VIÉVILLE-SOUS-LES-CÔTES (AFP) – At the foot of the farms outside a sleepy village in northern France, Sabine Rouas and her steed Aston, a 1.4-tonne bull, make stately progress.
A van pulls to a halt and the bemused driver takes out his phone to record the scene.
Aston’s outings often trigger the same reaction, and give Sabine a chuckle.
Aston is a local celebrity in the Meuse region, and now around the world, on the web.
Sabine’s husband Yannick Kirschhoffer is the bull’s social media manager, and Aston has 62,000 TikTok fans, 90,000 YouTube subscriptions and almost as many followers on Facebook.
Today the scene is cheerful, but the story begins in Sabine’s grief for her dead racehorse.
“Every rider has a particular relationship in their life with a horse. When he died, I didn’t want to hear about horses anymore,” she told AFP.
At that time in her life, Sabine – a sales manager – was living over the border in Luxembourg in a house by a cattle farm.
As time passed she watched the daily life of the cows and one day she decided to ask the farmer if she could meet them, to restore her bond with larger animals.
“I still had a problem with horses, but I missed being in contact with them. So I headed down to the farm and spotted a cow that seemed more alert than the others,” she said.
“I started to brush her. I could tell she was intelligent. She learnt to raise her hoof to me, to say hello, to respond to her name,” she said.
Sabine was delighted with her new friend but, when the cow had a calf, she took a dramatic decision, and bought them both.
“They said I was completely mad and it’s true I didn’t know anything about how to go about things.”
It wasn’t easy. She fell from the young bullock at least 38 times in three months, but nine years later Aston is a show pony: vaulting small hurdles, galloping, prancing sideways.
Today, the team lives in France and Aston has been learning lessons from his neighbours.
“Watching me ride horses, Aston wanted to do the same thing,” Sabine gushed. “By watching them, he learnt a lot, so we played on his talent for mimicry.”
