Here is a picture of my bolo:

The thick gray bar along one leg is a yard stick for scale.

I used to use it on grampa's farm to capture wayward calfs. It is made of two billard balls and a slightly smaller, solid, heavy plastic ball all of which are encased in leather. The two larger balls (brown leather) are fastened at either end of an 80-inch rope and the smaller ball (grey leather) is tied to the center of the "big ball" rope using a peice of rope aboout 15 inches long. All the rope is approximately the size/thickness of paracord.

To use, hold the smaller ball in your throwing hand and twirl the rest of the bolo around your head 2-3 times to build some momentum, then throw the smaller ball at your target just like throwing a baseball. Time the release of your throw so that the larger balls will fly towards your target when you throw the smaller ball. The goal is to impact the beast's leg with one cord of the bolo. Momentum will wrap the rest of the bolo around the beast's legs. It's neat to watch as due to conservastion of momentum the bolo wraps faster and faster as the cords shorten. It takes suprisingly little practice.

A note on the twirling: don't try and swing the balls around as fast as possible. You actually want to do it slow-to-medium, especially while first praciticing. If you swing them too fast you'll have no control. The smaller ball is supposed to be about 4/5ths as large as the larger balls but I don't remember why anymore. I think the differing sizes help the bolo open up in flight.

There was some concern at first that it'd cause the calf to break a leg but that never happened. I do not know if I just always got lucky or if calves' legs are really strong. Having been kicked by a few I'm leaning towards the super-strong theory.

-Blast