WOODLAND HILLS : 3 Longhorns Mosey Around at Leonis Adobe

For any city folk who think longhorns are just a football team and that “yearling bull” is a film starring Robert DeNiro, the docents at the historic Leonis Adobe have a lesson in cattle.

On Thursday, they became the proud caretakers of three purebred Texas longhorns to show visitors perfect specimens of animals that a century ago roamed the rural San Fernando Valley by the thousands.

“We’re perfectionists here,” said Phyllis Jones, director of the Old West-era Leonis Adobe museum. “We want to be able to show people the most beautiful cattle.”

A Porterville-based breeder gave the museum a 3-year-old cow, a 9-week-old calf and a yearling bull, in exchange for two mixed-breed cows and a promise to mate the purebred cow with a different bull each year. The calves will be turned over to the breeder, Larry Southard, after several months at Leonis Adobe.

“It will be nice to always have a new calf around for the children to see,” Jones said.

Descendants of Spanish stock, purebred and nearly purebred longhorn were raised in the Valley starting in the 1700s, but were slaughtered and bred with other strains of cattle to the point of near-extinction by the early 1900s, said Southard.

They were slowly revived by breeders who recognized that longhorn bulls make excellent studs for Western herds, because they are leaner and better suited to rugged terrain, Southard said. Although their flesh is lean, longhorns mixed with fatter breeds provide excellent beef, he said.

“These were cattle that you could drive for hundreds of miles, and they’d gain weight along the way,” Southard said. “Now they’re popular with historical places like this, because they have that nostalgia of the Old West.”

The longhorns at Leonis Adobe will be kept in a pen behind a double row of fences. That will keep visitors out of reach of their curled horns, Jones said, as well as safeguarding the cattle from adventurous locals.

“We’ve had a couple of times where at night guys get drunk at the cantina next door,” she said, “and then come over here and jump in the pen and run around with the animals, pretending they’re cowboys.”