Watch a steer run for its life through a Texas shopping district, get roped by two cowboys outside Walmart

A cowboy chases a runaway steer through Weatherford, Texas

(Image credit: AP/Weatherford Police Department)

last updated 6 February 2017

Last week, a steer escaped from a slaughterhouse in Weatherford, Texas — a town of 25,000 just west of Fort Worth — and if Charlotte's Web had taken place in Texas, involved a cow instead of a pig, and played out in front of a police cruiser's dashboard camera, it might have looked like this:

The steer ran free from Hamilton Meats on Thursday morning, and police and Animal Control officers chased it through the town's main shopping district for almost two hours before cowboy Blake Davies and a friend, Justin Farber, rode in to save the day — and the steer, probably. They finally roped the animal on South Main Street, outside a Taco Bell and Walmart. "I've never dodged cars and stuff like that," Davies told the Weatherford Democrat. "It was one of the wilder things I've ever had to do.... I just run up there, and thank God everybody stopped and seen me coming. I come blowing out that intersection right there toward at Walmart... I was going fast and so was that cow."

The steer did not come out of the chase through downtown Weatherford totally unscathed — it ran into the door of a police car, for example — but that may have saved its life, at least for now. Hamilton Meats has put the 800-pound cow out to pasture in De Leon. "Once you've chased an animal for two-and-a-half miles, throw ropes over it, run police cars into it, it's not very good to eat," a man at Hamilton Meats told the newspaper.