2009: The Year of the……Watusi?
GASSVILLE - Lurch the Watusi is big in Japan.
Lurch, for that matter, is big in Arkansas, too, or anywhere else Lurch might choose to visit. From tip to tip, Lurch’s Watusi horns exceed 7 1 /2 feet, and at their base, their circumference is 38 inches.
Neither measure is normal but certainly complements the impression that Lurch is large. So big, for that matter, that the 2005 Guinness Book of World Records gave him two pages. As big as he is in Arkansas, however, Lurch is really big in Japan.
In the last five years, says Janice Wolf, Lurch’s mom, seven television crews from Japan have visited Rocky Ridge Refuge. And in 2009, Lurch will be bigger than ever in Japan. In the oriental Zodiac, 2009 is the year of the ox, and though Lurch, technically, is not an ox, with proper training and medical procedures (look it up) he could have been, which was close enough for the Japanese comedian and his crew who showed up in mid-November.
They wanted to film and photograph Lurch for broadcast and for Year of the Ox New Year’s cards. They stretched a Happy New Year banner across his horns and took his picture.
“He stood there like a clothesline,” Ms. Wolf says. The crew dressed their comedian in a cowboy hat, boots and chaps. “Can you imagine?” Ms.Wolf says and chortles. “He no more looked like a cowboy than the man in the moon.”
Lurch’s favorite pastime is butting round hay bales. (Watch Lurch and his friends play with his birthday bale here: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ZOc4wfLX2Jo.) The Japanese TV crew wanted Lurch to knock their cowboy off a round bale, sort of a Japanese version of bullfighting. Or of chicken.
So the comedian and his inner John Wayne stood atop the bale as Lurch, the American bull who will star as an ox on Japanese television, charged. (To see it: www.youtube.com/user/ lurchmom.)You’ll also see some of Ms. Wolf’s other refugees, which would be a good start for Noah’s Ark: zebra, water buffalo, cats, dogs, peacocks, deer, horses, geese, sheep, donkeys.
As their fame has spread, more and more people show up to look at Lurch and his buddies. Which is fine. Ms. Wolf enjoys the occasional company of humans. But: “Don’t call it a petting zoo,” she says.
The current population at Rocky Ridge, according to Ms. Wolf’s Internet site (www.rockyridgerefuge.
com), is 60. “I don’t,” she says, “count too close.”
No question, though, which set of horns is the biggest: “The biggest,” she says, “on earth.”
