The most expensive Angus stud bull ever sold in Australia claimed the prize Thursday when a beast called Thunderstruck went under the auctioneer’s hammer for $360,000.
ABC News Australia reports the 12-month-old bull is the second-most-expensive beef animal ever traded in Australia, coming in behind a $400,000 Wagyu heifer sold last year.
Vendors Ben and Wendy Mayne said Thunderstruck would “take the Angus breed to the next level”.
Texas Thunderstruck T383 was described by its sellers as a gamechanger, having been the standout calf from a cohort of 350.
“The style and stature of this young sire is something you have to see for yourself,” the Maynes said in their catalogue comments.
“Presence, power, performance and profitability.”
Texas Angus has had exclusive semen rights to Thunderstruck’s sire, American-based Poss Rawhide, for the past two years.
Thunderstruck is the only Rawhide son to be sold in the Southern Hemisphere this year.
Mayne told the outlet he was still disbelieving the animal went for such a price.
“Particularly the way the industry is at the moment, with the dry weather and the market dropping down about 40 per cent,” he said.
File/A farmer herds Black Angus cows during a cattle drive in this aerial photograph taken over a farm in Gunnedah, New South Wales, Australia, on Friday, May 29, 2020. (David Gray/Bloomberg via Getty)
“The opening bid was $10,000, then it went to $100,000 and we’re going ‘Oh my God, this is alright’, then it went to $200,000.
In 2021, the Mayne family broke the Angus bull record selling Texas Iceman R725 for $225,000.
Mackenzie said through semen collection alone, Iceman had already “well and truly” paid for himself.
“That’s not counting the thousands of semen straws to [artificially inseminate] our own cows.”