At the foot of the vineyards outside a sleepy village in northern France, Sabine Rouas and her steed Aston, a 1.4-tonne bull, make stately progress. A van pulls to a halt and the bemused driver takes out his phone to record the scene. Aston’s outings often trigger the same reaction, and give Sabine a chuckle. “Honestly, I didn’t invent this,” she says. “Look around the world, people ride all sorts of animals – ostriches, camels, elephants.” Aston is a local celebrity in the Meuse region, and now around the world, on the web. Sabine’s husband Yannick Kirschhoffer is the bull’s social media manager, and Aston has 62,000 TikTok fans, 90,000 YouTube subscriptions and almost as many followers on Facebook.