WEATHERFORD, Texas — Old-fashioned cowboys helped save the day in Texas after a bull escaped the butcher and beat a roughly 2-mile path through busy streets late Thursday morning. 

The Charolais bull, a variety of beef cattle, escaped from Hamilton Meats in the small Texas suburb of Weatherford, 10 miles east of Dallas-Forth Worth, and lead animal control officers and police on a hour-plus-long chase, battering a police vehicle along the way.

Cowboys on horseback captured the bull in the middle of South Main Street near a Walmart as passersby watched from their vehicles. 

Weatherford police got a call around 11 a.m. of the animal jaunting past a Compass Bank, according to spokesman Sgt. Jason Hayes.

While the animal caused damage to the police patrol vehicle, nobody was injured, Hayes said. 

“I never seen so many animal control vehicles,”  said Sherri Gray, who saw the animal on the loose. “But this cowboy was there and he was riding right down the middle of the road there trying to chase and rope that steer and he did.

“I’d just give anything if everybody could have seen it.” 

“I’m just tickled to death that the good Lord spared everybody,” Gray said. “There wasn’t any car wrecks. The horse didn’t get hurt. The guy roping him didn’t get hurt.”

The bull was loaded onto a trailer and taken back to the butcher. The animal’s fate is currently unknown. 

Coyne writes for the Weatherford, Texas Democrat.