Spud the bull plays soccer like his mom

Name: Spud the bull plays soccer like his mom
Uploaded: 2022-03-13T13:00:03Z
Duration: 4 min 24 s
Description: "He's just a big dog with a ball," Laura says, and Spud the bull does his best to prove it.

"He's just a big dog with a ball," Laura says, and Spud the bull does his best to prove it. more

Spud loves pressure on his head. He pushes into a ball until it folds around his face and covers his head, and sooner or later it pops. "He hates when it does that," Laura says. "It breaks his heart, but he does it every time."

His first ball was a green jolly ball, and he went at it like a soccer player. Laura calls the play as it happens, first a header, then Spud lining up a shot and going for goal.

A large brown bull with a white face stands near a green ball on muddy ground. A headline runs in white letters across the lower third. — Spud's very first ball was a green jolly ball, and he played it like a soccer star.

The balls don't last. Laura has lost count, but she figures he has gone through at least three jolly balls and four stability balls, plus a few of the little kid balls from the bin at Walmart. A friend once asked to give him theirs, and it's the only one that has made it past a week.

Laura met Spud as a senior in college, where she had been recruited to play soccer. A course there let students raise an animal, and she asked her teacher for one that would have a future. A week before graduation, the teacher called. Spud, he told her, wasn't going to have that future anymore.

Laura wouldn't accept that. Her teacher came up with another way, which was for Spud to go home with her to Illinois. She called her parents to ask if the little bull she had been raising could come too. The biggest thing her teacher told her was "you have to get him to know you."

A cow with a black coat and white markings in an outdoor snowy setting, suggesting winter. The headline runs in white letters across the lower third. — "He's just a big dog with a ball," Laura says, and Spud the bull does his best to prove it.

Spud knows her now. Her favorite moment comes early, when he's not awake yet and she calls out to him. He gets up and pokes his head out of his barn, as if to say, oh, morning, Mom.

Her surprise for the new year is a new ball, and it's huge. Spud takes one look and seems stunned, all wide eyes. Then he gets to work, shoving the giant ball across the snow. "He loves it," Laura says.

A bull pushes a large, colorful ball across snowy ground near bare trees. A headline runs in white letters across the lower third. — Spud gets to work on his huge new ball and pushes it across the snow.

Laura has had Spud for six years, and every year the two of them take a birthday picture together. One year there was a huge grain ball with a candle in it.

Spud has taught her that there's so much more to animals, and even people. "You don't have to be what you're expected to be in life," she says. A bull is supposed to be aggressive and standoffish, but Spud has only shown her love, fun and adventure. "I still see that little 300-pound bull that never was supposed to be mine," she says. "I want every day to be a good day for him."

#adoption