When the penis emerges from the bull’s furry sheath, no more than two or three seconds pass—four, tops—before the bull ejaculates or loses interest and dismounts. That gives Jim Cameron somewhere between one and two seconds to crouch underneath the two-thousand-pound animal and then another second to take the artificial vagina he is holding in his right hand—which, minutes earlier, he filled with warm tap water to make it feel more, how to put it, vaginesque—and aim the open end onto the penis, which is thrusting, and intercept the spurt of semen. That’s the difficult part. Once the penis is inside the artificial vagina, it all goes quickly. There is one thrust, maybe two, and the work is complete. It is dangerous work. During collections, a bull can lose his footing and fall on the man crouching beneath him. In more than thirty years of semen collecting, this has happened to Cameron once, in 1985, when he was collecting from a dairy bull. “He fell right across me legs,”
