Kalu weighs a tonne and Chandu 23 maunds. Four-year-old Kalu is priced at Tk 11 lakh and three-year-old Chandu at Tk 8 lakh. A farmer named Siddique Mir in Kalapara, Patuakhali, has prepared these two giant bulls for the Eid-ul-Azha market.

Buyers are coming every day to farmer Siddique Mir's home in Thonjupara village of Latachapli union in the upazila to see Kalu and Chandu, his two Sahiwal and Holstein bulls. The farmer has also announced that whoever buys Kalu will get a goat as a gift.

In 2019 Siddique bought Kalu and a cow for Tk 83,000 to raise. Since then the cow has given birth to a calf every year. Besides Kalu and Chandu, his farm has two more bulls and a cow; he is preparing the two bulls for next year.

Siddique Mir is a farmer by profession. He said he began raising one bull four years ago and the other three years ago. The two now need about a thousand taka worth of feed every day, and so far he has spent nearly ten lakh taka on them. There is nothing royal about Kalu and Chandu's menu, though, because he started raising them as a hobby, not commercially.

Their regular diet is straw, bran, maize flour, broken rice, gram and other ordinary field grass and leaves. But everyone in Siddique's family looks after Kalu and Chandu's health. With a fan always running overhead and baths two or three times a day, the household spares no effort in caring for them.

"If someone buys Kalu, I will give a goat free with it. But there is nothing free with Chandu," Siddique Mir said. "I started raising them as a hobby and today I have succeeded. If I get the price I want now, it will all have been worth it."

Siddique Mir's son Mozammel Hossain said the giant bulls are very hard to handle. "We have raised them with a lot of hard work. There is no other cattle this big in the area, so people keep coming from different places to see our Kalu and Chandu. But they are hard to control now, so we do not take them out of the cowshed much."

A neighbour named Mahbub told Jagonews: "We have never seen bulls like this in this area. None has been raised here in the past few years, so it is very nice, and many people have come to see them. Every year we used to go to the market to see such big bulls, but now we are seeing them in our own area."

Kalapara upazila livestock officer Dr Mohammad Gazi Shah Alam told Jagonews that farmer Siddique's two bulls are among the most notable in the upazila. "We praise his hard work. We are giving the fullest support to those who are following his lead and taking an interest in livestock rearing." This year about 20,982 animals in all have been prepared for sacrifice in the upazila, he said.

Source: Jagonews24. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.