'Tropic Thunder' wranglers add water buffalo to their résumés

Shawn Weber and Scott Davis get a docile, 1,500-pound cow ready for her close-up. > WHEN Shawn Weber and Scott Davis first arrived in California, neither suspected that two decades later they would be spending their nights and weekends with a 1,500-pound water buffalo. Both had experience with animals of a more domestic stripe -- Weber, a former vet tech, has worked as a trainer on films including 2007's "Underdog," 1999's "Stuart Little" and 1998's "The Parent Trap," while Davis, who came to California with the rodeo, began wrangling horses and cattle for films such as 1999's "Wild Wild West" and 1994's "Maverick." But for Ben Stiller’s new comedy, “ Tropic Thunder,” in which actors making a war movie find themselves in peril in the jungles of Southeast Asia, the experts, who work closely with the American Humane Assn., needed to contend with a different kind of beast. (link)