I had a moose encounter yesterday. I took the dog and checked the chickens, the went to the little barn to get flats and pots. Coming back the house, a small moose was coming out of my wife's snow-covered flower bed. The moose and the dog saw each other at the same time, and ran at each other, but both stopped before contact, but when the dag turned his face away from the moose to return to me, the moose charged him and stomped him down as I started the snowmachine to scare him away. I don't generally carry weapons when we haven't had trouble with the animals nearby but I may have to start carrying a flare gun at least. A flare gun works quite well in winter when the ground is snow-covered, but cannot be used in summer due to the fire danger. The old dog recovered fine and seems to have suffered no ill effects, but I probably wouldn't have been so fortunate. It was a small yearling moose that appeared to be in bad shape after a hard winter and had cuts on its head like it had been in a fight. He went into thee woods and laid in the snow for a few hours, then got up and walked down the creek. Wife saw a large moose in nearby woods on her way home, so that may have been the one the little moose fought with and why he/she was so irritable. All appears to be okay now.
I can't imagine living among those critters. I have black bear on my property, and they're generally unimpressed with the presence of humans, but they are not aggressive like that. My understanding is that even when their cubs are present, mama bear is gonna gather them up and get them away from danger rather than attack...of course, I'm not gonna test that theory. I understand that moose can be very aggressive and very unrelenting...and I bet they can outrun a human. You have brown bear, too, don't you?
Hokey Smoke, Mister Wilson. That trick never works. For those who don't feel like watching the video, the answer to "Why are moose attacking people?" is "It's their natural behaviour." Suddenly, Captain Obvious is an expert.
Yeah, we have brown bears in the area, but so far they have never given us a problem. When they do come onto your property, they are there for the livestock. Black bears have been around our place off and on, but have never really presented a problem. We had a black bear tear a hole in the floor of the mobile home we used to store dog tack when we had a dog team, and eat most of a 50 pound bag of dogfood. We had one try to get into our dumpster unsuccessfully last year. Moose kill far more people in Alaska than bears do. Moose are the most dangerous critter here.
I've mentioned it in a post shortly after it happened, but a young bull moose was eating at the tree line along the road just outside of town, so I pulled over to take a picture. Since he was on the passenger side of the road, I got out of the car in order to get a better picture, and he did what was probably a fake charge. I ran back to the car and he was back to eating by the time I got in. No picture that day. There are quite a lot of black bears around here but even if I spend a lot of time in the woods, I rarely see a bear. They show up on camera a lot but are generally aware of me before I am aware of them, so I don't see them.
Both, but I was speaking of personal encounters. A few years back in Anchorage, some college kids were throwing snowballs at a moose to torment it on campus. The moose didn't attack the kids, but killed an elderly man entering the library. We have the animals on personal property all the time, and there have been a few instances where moose have entered grocery stores and even hospital ERs with automatic doors. (You can find the videos on YouTube). Many times they attack those who are not aware of how dangerous they are.
I’m one who didn’t know moose were so dangerous. Would have thought bear, black or brown, would be more dangerous. Of course I’m a city boy.
The most dangerous animal in Maine is the moose, not the black bear, although both are common animals here. Of course, a lot of the danger comes from running into them while driving because moose are too stupid or too stubborn to get off the road, and a whole lot harder to see at night, as compared to a deer. Moose are also well known to attack without discernable provocation, and they can cover fifty yards in a few seconds. They don't like people getting too close to them, and if they can see you, they might consider it to be too close. I've seen videos of even very young moose beating the crap out of people. On the other hand, there hasn't been a fatal black bear attack in Maine since the 1830s, and that was a caged bear.
The other thing is that, unlike many other wild animals, moose don't generally just wander around the woods. As hunters learn, they usually stick to paths that they travel regularly and, because they consider it to be their path, they especially hate it when someone tries to turn it into a bicycle path or a hiking path, even if it started out as a bike path. Usually, if you get off of the trail and keep a tree between you and the moose, the moose will walk on by.
Up north of here along the Yukon river, the moose follow trails and even sometimes form herd that migrate together. Down here, they are much more random in their travels. Originally, supposedly, the moose in Alaska were only along the Yukon and on the Alaska Peninsula, but when Katmai erupted in 1912, it drove the moose to many other parts of what is now the State of Alaska. That is why the behavior is different.
A moose came into our back yard, in Fairbanks, the night of our wedding. We were told they are fertility symbols. Nine months to the day, our daughter was born. So - - - -
Where Yvonne comes from in Idaho, moose are regular sightseers and can be seen walking through town stopping occasionally to snack on anything that interests them. I’ve told the story at length before but a shorter version won’t hurt. We had a family who were regulars on Friday night at our restaurant in Moie Springs, Idaho. As usual, on one Friday night we had their table set and was ready for them to arrive but they didn’t show. The next day I had to run up the road to the store and the guy (sans family) was there. When he saw me he approached and apologized profusely for not keeping his regular reservation whilst also explaining that when they were on their way to the restaurant the night before, a moose was standing in the middle of the highway and didn’t want to move. As luck would have it, the guy realized that he had a moose tag so he got out of the truck and shot the moose and by the time they dressed it out enough to load it up, it was too late to go to our restaurant. Of course, one might suspect that it could have been a moose tale but the proof of his adventure was that the head of the obviously full grown bull moose was laying in the back of his pickup.