For two hours last week a bull ran through the streets of Jamaica, Queens, trotting between parked cars and across lawns after escaping from a slaughterhouse. All the while, the police engaged in a frenetic and televised pursuit, as they tried to corner the animal with a police car (it jumped over the hood) and bring it down with tranquilizer darts (for a time, the bull kept going despite the sedative.)

What they really needed was a cowboy.

“Cops are not cowboys. They don’t think like cowboys,” said James Parker, a Korean War veteran who walks with a cane and is the president of the Black Cowboys Association of Brooklyn. In his apartment in East New York, Brooklyn, he keeps the ultimate bull-catching weapon: a lasso.

“I said, ‘Oh my God, I wish I was in Queens,’ ” he said. “I would have caught that bull.’”

Wayward animals in the city are not an uncommon sight. There are more than 20 red meat slaughterhouses in New York City, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, and jailbreaks do happen. The Queens bull died en route to a city shelter in East New York after its ordeal, but another fleeing bull last spring met a better end; cornered on the campus of York College, also in Jamaica, it was taken to a farm animal sanctuary in Watkins Glen, N.Y, after the former talk show host Jon Stewart intervened.

Last year, a deer that wandered out of a tangle of Harlem woods and onto the lawn of a public housing complex was shot with a tranquilizer dart. It died while the mayor and governor played a political chess match over its fate, debating whether it could be safely released elsewhere, or whether it had to be euthanized to prevent the potential spread of disease.