This morning the drawstring of the bottom of my jacket, which has a little barrel-shaped piece of plastic on each end, had the little barrel wind around the top bar of the gate, and force me to stop abruptly.
This reminded me of that Argentine vaqueros who use a bolo
in preference to a lasso. But when I went to search for description and definition, I could find only mentions of bolo knives, bolo ties, and a weapon of mass destruction.
The bolo I am interested in is a thin buty strong rope, perhaps ten feet long, with a weight perhaps the size of a fist at each end. In use, one weight is held in the left hand, the other end is whirled, and the whole thing thrown at a running animal so that the rope is almost perpendicular to the direction of the throw. When rope hits the animals legs, one of the weights wraps the rope about the legs several times, binding the legs together, causing animal to fall and be unable to get up. I think I saw it mentioned in Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle.
I also remember a bit of newspaper hype about a boxer from Argentina who had a "bolo punch" - good only for publicity.

I found this from Darwin's book:
"This was the great adventure of Charles Darwin's life. Indeed, it would have been a great adventure for anyone--tracking condor in Chile, surviving the great earthquake of 1835, riding across country on horseback in the company of gauchos, watching whales leaping skyward off Tierra del Fuego, hunting ostriches with a bolo, discovering prehistoric fossils and previously unknown species, and meeting primitive peoples such as the Fuegians. "

I remember those as toys in the late 1960s. But I don't think they were called boloes. What were they called [racking brains]?

Bingley