The first installment of PBR Livestock Director/ABBI Director/PBR Co-Founder/PBR Ring of Honor recipient Cody Lambert’s regular column for the Bull Pen.

The ABBI’s 4-Second Rule for Futurity Bulls

The reason for the change in the Futurity rule, going from 6 seconds to 4 seconds, was because a lot of us felt like 6 seconds had the potential to negatively affect the young bulls’ performances.

The reason for a dummy is to be able to train a bull. And to train him you can’t make him kick higher or jump harder or spin faster, but what you can do—when he does everything he can to get the foreign object off his back—is let him win. That means pushing the button and letting that dummy come off. That teaches the bull that that is how he can get the dummy off, by kicking higher and spinning faster.

Over the last four years, I’ve seen bulls over and over again that were giving every ounce of effort they had in them and doing everything you could ask them to do. But there’s no way they can buck that dummy off until someone pushes that button—and after 4 or 5 seconds some of these young bulls start getting tired and slowing down. And then the horn goes off and the dummy comes off.

This might make the bull think ‘maybe if I slow down, this thing will come off of me.’ And of course, that is the exact opposite of what the dummy is designed for and for what we want to happen. We don’t want them to equate slowing down with the dummy coming off. I’ve judged several ABBI Futurities since the inception of the organization and I’ve never seen a bull I couldn’t score in 4 seconds.

And that goes for Classic and PBR bulls as well. There isn’t one I couldn’t have formed an accurate enough opinion of, if he was ridden 4 seconds. After talking to a lot of bull owners and people who have been through years of developing bulls, we decided it was time to go to 4 seconds rather than 6. It was voted on by the ABBI shareholders and it was nearly unanimous; I think only one breeder voted against it.