Dudley the bull kicks up his heels on a new leg

The call came from a woman just outside Nashville, Tennessee. She had spotted a bull on a cattle ranch whose foot had been severed. She begged the owner to let her find him a home, but there are not many takers for a 500-pound cow. When the Gentle Barn called, she was so thankful.

One rescuer had pictured the rancher as someone impossible to relate to. Instead, he had "such a kind face and kind eyes." He had bought the calf at a sale ten and a half months before, hurt leg and all, and guessed a trailer door had slammed on it. It was worse. A string had wrapped tight around it and cut off the blood. There was no money for surgery or a prosthetic foot, so the bull hobbled around a pasture for ten months.

His name is Dudley, and when the rescuers first see him, someone says, "He's missing his entire foot." "It broke my heart to see how much pain he was in," a rescuer says, "and how innocent and sweet he is." He's still a baby, only a year old, and he had hobbled on three legs over frozen ground, with little spikes sticking up from the dirt, and for maybe six months he never put that foot down.

The rancher has his own story. His dad learned the wrong way from his own dad and passed it on, and by 18 he was angry and rough himself. Then came a wake-up call. "I'm doing everything wrong," he told himself, and he had "a lot of apologizing to do and a lot of soul searching." After talking with the Gentle Barn, he can see he has done something good. "I've kept the cow alive and kept him from going to slaughter."

His truck and trailer had carried probably hundreds of cows to auction over the years. This time the rancher drove Dudley three hours to a hospital to save his life.

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At the University of Tennessee, the vets find more trouble. Dudley can't shift his weight onto the injured leg, and his good leg now has tendon damage. Dr. Anderson watches him walk and stays hopeful. "I can see by the way he's walking that he wants to use that leg." The bones left in the stump would feel like walking on rocks in your shoes, so the first step is a careful amputation to give him a better surface to stand on.

One of the rescuers remembers watching them wheel him into surgery and feeling "like they just took my child." Cows are risky under anesthesia. Thousands of people were praying for him, and she kept thinking how terrible it would be if he didn't wake up. He does. The surgery goes really well, and the vets can shape the leg to give him the best chance with a prosthesis.

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Then comes the slow part. Ten months of limping on a stump had worn on his spine and his whole body, so he has rehab ahead to build his muscle back, first on a temporary leg and later on a prosthetic one fitted to keep sores away.

When Dudley finally reaches the Gentle Barn pasture on his new leg, he doesn't stand still for long. He runs and leaps around the field, kicking up his heels like the young bull he is.