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Moose attacks snowmobiler


norseman

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Dudes lucky to be alive that moose got a few good kicks in!

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  • gigantor unlocked this topic
  • 6 months later...

That sucks. Drag it got to that point. I've never ridden a snow mobile, how hard would it have been to back up that trail once he saw the moose? Give it a few minutes to let the moose go on his way. 

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I got caught in the same situation. I fired one warning shot, and like the video, it was essentially a wasted round. But I had bailed from my machine and went into the deep snow off to the side. She wasn't after me. She's pissed off at the machine, and she doesn't want to do what I did: bail iff the packed trail into the deep snow.

 

Not all snowmachines have reverse, but most of the newer ones do. I was towing a cargo sled. There was no backing up, and no turning.

 

If the guy in the video did anything wrong, it was pushing her too hard, too soon. But moose are called swamp donkeys for a reason: they're stubborn and ornery. They've been known to attack freight trains to avoid leaving a plowed railroad right-of-way to wade in deep snow. I spent a good part of one snowy winter as a railroad employee just harvesting moose meat for the poor every day. In the winter of 1988-89, the Alaska Railroad killed nearly 700 moose. Automobiles killed another thousand.

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I met a large bull moose one day in the East Kootenai region while riding my mountain bike along an abandoned logging railway grade. No amount of hollering, waving, and whistling could get him to get off the path, so I had to turn around and go back the way I came. He didn't seem angered or annoyed, just not inclined to walk anywhere but along the path I was on. Since his rack was as wide as the trail, it was all his. Although I was hunting deer and elk, there was no open season on moose in that Management Area, so I had to pass up what could have been my easiest moose kill ever!

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2 hours ago, Huntster said:

f the guy in the video did anything wrong, it was pushing her too hard, too soon.

 

Yeah, he kept creeping toward her. A little more patience and she might have walked away. He's lucky she didn't kill him in that attack. 

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4 hours ago, Huntster said:

In the winter of 1988-89, the Alaska Railroad killed nearly 700 moose. Automobiles killed another thousand.

 

My position is that Moose do not back down. Best leave them alone.  Does Hunster remember the Moose that derailed a train? During periods of heavy snowfall, train tracks are the easiest path to travel on until they meet an iron horse.

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I think he kept pushing and pushing and pushing every time.  I know nothing about snowmobiles but if he could have backed up, left the trail, or at least just waited for a while, there might have been a different outcome. 

 

The snowmobiler gets a thumbs down from me.

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8 hours ago, Catmandoo said:

 

My position is that Moose do not back down. Best leave them alone.......

 

Yeah, this is sadly true. The reality is that if the moose has the trail, and if you can't get her moving forward (or far enough to get into an open area where you can get off trail and go around her), you may as well turn around. Once they get pissed off, even a "safe distance" doesn't stay safe long.

 

Dog sledders really have it tough. Moose hate dogs way more than they hate snowmobiles.

 

..........

Does Hunster remember the Moose that derailed a train?...........

 

I worked a train wreck caused by a moose collision. The train hit the moose and flung it into the switch stand, ripping it from the ties, and the switch opened under the train. Mainline switches had "moose locks" just for that event, but it also was damaged in that wreck. 

 

One morning we rode our railcar from Broad Pass to Carlo Creek, a distance of about 25 miles. Just north of Broad Pass a train had hit a moose the night before. Apparently the moose had got caught on the locomotive on the plow or underneath. There were little chunks of meat, hide, fur, and droplets of blood in the white snow on the tracks for the entire length of our journey and beyond. We never saw a chunk of moose much larger than a golf ball. 

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The dead moose, moose pieces freeze. Whenever possible, the meat is donated to food banks. Does the RR have a slogan like   'we kill 'em, you grill 'em'?

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LOL.........No, the railroad is like other entities in that they try to keep their portion of the slaughter low key. They do try to salvage meat, but the vast majority is wasted. 

 

Years after working for the railroad I was working for the Army on Ft, Rich. The ARR mainline goes through the bade. A train killed a cow moose, and it got reported p. I was sent out with a front end loader and a co-worker had a small dump truck. We were told to take it to the dump, but we found a fully intact cow with a little blood coming from a nostril. We hauled it to my tool shed, and I field dressed it with a Gerber Micro pocket knife featuring a 1.5" blade. Took it home and started processing it, but it had a funny smell. It turned out that the gall bladder had been burst, and it ruined the whole moose. :o

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