A Connecticut farmhand has been left paralyzed from the waist down after he was charged by a bull ‘in heat’.
Randy Jaquins, 59, had just finished milking cows and was leading the animals back into a barn when he was attacked by the bull at Locust Road Farm in Winsted, Connecticut on Friday.
‘He was in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ his sister Ellen Hull told Hearst Connecticut Media. ‘The bull was in heat because it’s their mating season at this time of year.’
Jaquins suffered a broken neck and his sister said he told her he was left lying with his injuries for ‘quite some time’ before he was found.
Randy Jaquins, 59, had just finished milking cows when he was charged by the bull
Experts warn that bulls are aggressive and unpredictable when they are in mating season (stock photo)
After the farmer was eventually discovered, Jaquins was rushed to a nearby hospital.
The farmhand was left paralyzed alone for ‘quite some time’ before he was found
Doctors were able to fuse a vertebrae in his neck, and Hull said when she visited her brother in the hospital he was conscious and speaking.
‘He’s aware of what happened,’ she said.
‘He told me that he had been laying in the field for quite some time that day before anyone found him.’
Hull added that his recovery will be a ‘big adjustment’, and said that his family ‘don’t even know hw long he’s going to be at the hospital at this point.’
In a GoFundMe set up to help with his rehabilitation, his sister said: ‘We are all hoping this will be temporary but are preparing for the worst.’
Experts warn that bulls can become violent and unpredictable when they are in heat, which occurs during mating season at the peak of summer.
The breed, which account for only around two percent of cattle numbers in the US, were responsible for 48 percent of deaths caused by cattle in 2020, according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries and the Surveillance of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses databases.