For a bucking bull to be “safe,” the tips of his horns have to be flat, as wide as a half dollar. That’s so when — not if — he hits a rider with them, the rider will not be impaled. Contractors use an angle grinder to sand a bull’s horns to those desired specifications, and when they do so, the resulting detritus smells like sawdust plus burning human hair plus a little unnamed pungency.
I learned all of this in the hours I spent at KEY Ranch in Page, Arizona, as part of the first installment of a new Cowboys & Indians project we’ve dubbed “Working the West,” in which we volunteer our amateur services for the real
