Shankar The Bull is getting settled in at an animal sanctuary in New Jersey, having come out the other side of his brief brush with fame after he frolicked on the Prospect Park ballfields earlier this week. But though the young bull's mad dash to freedom was mostly met with citywide acclaim, there was one tiny victim—a two-year-old girl, whom Shankar knocked out of her stroller in his haste. Now, her mother's speaking out.
Catherine McRae told ABC 7 that her toddler daughter was "covered in blood" after Shankar flipped her stroller while he rushed through Brooklyn on Tuesday. "We were on the sidewalk, I heard someone yell, 'Run,'" she told the outlet. "The cow kind of hit between us, between me and the stroller, and just knocked the stroller completely over, right on top of her and upside down." Though the little girl didn't suffer any permanent damage, she did come away from the encounter with some bruises, scratches and cuts.
"I had that terrifying moment where her face was just covered in blood," McCrae said. "And I just kept wiping blood away. And you fear the worst when you're a mom. It's like, you see your child's blood, and you just get terrified."
Shankar was eventually cornered on a soccer field, tranquilized, and shipped off to Skylands Animal Sanctuary in New Jersey, where president and founder Mike Stura says he's acclimating. Though he's got some energy to burn: "He's being a maniac," Stura told Gothamist yesterday. "He's healthy but he's definitely a wild man. He's got a lot of energy, I'll tell you that."
Shankar is just under a year old and weighs 650 pounds—a human girl toddler, for comparison's sake, weighs an average of 26.5 pounds, so you can see how the odds stack up.
