The $10,000 bull at Arizona Cowboy College

Rocco with Lori on one of their Brangus bulls.

A pot-belly “attack” pig snoozing at the back door.

Teaching greenhorns how to be cowboys isn’t the only thing Rocco and Lori do on the Lorill Ranch, the campus of Arizona Cowboy College. In addition to the 40-plus horses on the ranch, there are half-a-dozen border collies and Australian shepherds, 9 mini-horses, 2 wild BLM mustangs, a potbellied pig, a cow, assorted chickens and roosters, and 5 breeding Brangus bulls.

“Frankly,” says Rocco, “the bulls are the reason people come here.”

A Brangus bull is a cross between an Angus and a Brahman. They’ve been breeding them for a hundred years but they didn’t really take off until the 40s when the government got involved in breeding the bulls at their Experiment Station in Jeanerette, Louisiana. This was during WWII when beef was a tough commodity. The USDA was looking for a good-eating animal (the Angus) that also had the Brahman’s natural ability to thrive under adverse conditions. Thus the Brangus.

It’s not unusual for breeding bulls, such as the ones Rocco and Lori raise, to be worth $10,000 or more. Sometimes a lot more.

In a story two years ago in the Smithsonian magazine on breeding bulls, they quote one Donnell Brown, a fifth-generation ranger from Texas, who designed a bull, “chose the semen, selected the dam, prepared and inseminated the uterus” and named the “astonishing bull with a handsome, wide muzzle, stunning scrotal circumference and a square frame solid as a sycamore” Revelation.

Said the bull breeder, “We don’t intend to present this bull as divine, but we do count it a blessing to have raised him.”

He eventually sold Revelation to a Houston businessman with a weekend ranch for $12,000. No bull.