No no, you don’t understand, moose really do get that big. Take it from a Canadian. I’ve seen that bullshit in person. Scary as all heck.
And that’s how people can die if they hit a moose. Seriously, one of our fears when driving in the country is having to deal with this scenario of a moose jumping out in front of the car.
moose are actual legit ice age megafauna; theyve been here since the ice age, they are old as fuck. they also are pretty terrifying and ive echoed this before but i went to wiki and “In terms of raw numbers, they attack more people than bears and wolves combined” and “ In the Americas, moose injure more people than any other wild mammal and, worldwide, only hippopotamuses injure more.”
like, fuck off with that
I was dog sitting a dog once who insisted she had to go out in the middle of the night it was an emergency, so I took her out. Suddenly she starts pointing and barking and I look up and can just make out the outline of a HUGE moose. I’ve been accidentally face to face with a black bear and that scared me less than being up close with a moose. I’m 5 foot so imagine staring up at an animal several feet taller than you that is debating charging the dog who’s leash you are holding. I was terrified as I grabbed the dog by her collar to get better control over her and backed up slowly til I was out of line of sight and bolted for the house at a dead run. Did you know most Canadian lake monster stories come from people seeing moose swimming? They are massive animals.
They are massive and they charge. I get so scared when tourists are all “oh yeah, we got out of the car to get a closer look and, ya’ll have some mighty impressive animals around here.”
Yes, yes we do, and they have mighty tired guardian angels because moose can, and do, charge at people.
Someone my mom worked with died hitting a moose on the highway. Their eyes don’t reflect light. In the dark they are literally nothing but a big slightly darker shape in the night.
Roughly every year in the town I grew up in, a cow (moose) and her calf will wander through downtown. Maybe once or twice. If she’s aggressive enough, the local Mounties will escort her through to keep idiots away.
I’ve definitely talked with people who thought moose were deer-sized or maybe horse-sized and I was like NO YOU DON’T EVEN UNDERSTAND MOOSE ARE TERRIFYING
Moose are terrifying, you guys.
I finally live on a province where moose and deer exist.
I do not drive at night in fear of meeting one. If you hit a moose going 90 on a highway, not only is your car trashed, you are probably trashed. I’ve seen cars that got wrecked and there seems to be a consensus that at least half the time, the giant fucking beastie just shakes itself off and continues gallumphing along the countryside.
If you fucking hit a moose with your car and their legs go through your windshield, congratulations, you are dead. Massive hooves kicking you to death? Yeah.
Moose are fucking terrifying. Bull moose won’t fuck with you too much unless you fuck with them, but the time a bull moose casually swaggered his way past 7 year old me when I was sledding literally put me off winter sports for a solid month.
Momma moose and their babies, though? I legitimately had to call in to work to be like “ey yo there is a moose in my driveway and I can’t get out” AND MY MANAGERS UNDERSTOOD.
Moose. MOOSE.
I have to admit I thought they were like a Canadian deer before this.
The commenter above who claims that moose’s eyes don’t reflect light is only partially correct; if you shine a flashlight in a moose’s eyes it will glow like a cat (and then you will probably get killed to death by an annoyed moose) but the reason they are so dangerous to cars at nights is that they are too tall for the headlights to reach. Think about that.
Moose confirmed for actual kaiju.
Kaiju category: Maple.
Now I kinda want a kaiju movie set in Canada where it’s just a moose. Like a regular moose but more aggressive.
For scale, a female african elephant is 7.2-8.5 feet at the shoulder, according to Wikipedia. A moose is
4.6 – 6.9 ft. at the shoulder. So instead of thinking “This animal is a bit bigger than a deer” you can think “This animal is barely smaller than an elephant”
And they can run up to 40 miles per hour
A 16 wheeler with fur
As a child, the most aggressive piece of safety we were taught was to never approach a moose, especially if it had babies. I heard more about the methods to avoid moose than I did about stranger danger. There were posters everywhere.
did I ever tell y’all about the time my dad’s friend got near-fatally stabbed by a deer
I worry that you may look at this and picture my dad’s friend being gored by a deer. you may think I am being slightly careless or hyperbolic with my word choice
oh no. no no no.
he got stabbed by a deer. with a knife. a deer used a knife to stab him and he almost died.
okay so
It is a fact of life in the time and location in Ohio where this story takes place that the deer population has no natural predators in the area. Regulated human hunting is necessary to keep the population to a healthy size.
And deer season opens in staggered brackets, right? Bowhunting opens first, to give people using bows and arrows a chance to get their shot in (no pun intended) before people with loud guns start scaring all the game away. Bore-loading rifles open next, works up to shotguns, etc. If you want to hunt deer with a machine gun you have to wait until everyone else has had their turn, basically.
So while my dad’s friend here does enjoy hunting for sport, he doesn’t need the meat the way some people do and as such he doesn’t feel right using guns; anyway, he likes the extra challenge of bowhunting, and it makes him feel better knowing that the deer have a sporting chance.
So he’s out there with a bow and arrow right when deer come into season.
Hits one. Clean shot, deer goes down, so the guy pulls out his hunting knife and walks up to this deer, which has just been shot and is by all rights already dead. He’s just doing the humane thing and checking to make sure so that he can give it a mercy stroke if it’s still clinging weakly to life.
This deer ain’t clinging weakly to shit.
So the poor man squats down next to its head, holding his hunting knife responsibly with the point facing down so that if he stumbles and falls he won’t impale himself. It’s what you’re supposed to do.
Dying deer looks him in the eye and has a split second in which it telepathically communicates:Fuck you.
Kicks out exactly one time.
Hits the knife perfectly and drives it into the guy’s thigh up to the hilt. And then dies.
Anyway there are some pretty fucking important veins and arteries in your thigh, which the deer’s Taking You With Me move thankfully missed. So this man who just wanted to give deer a fair fight ended up in the middle of the woods with a gushing thigh wound and almost bled out before he managed to get himself back to his car and very, very carefully make his way to the hospital.
(By all accounts he was very good-natured about the whole thing. Once he was no longer in immediate danger of dying he thought it was hilarious. In his own words, “It’s not like I can blame him, you know? I mean…that’s fair. That’s fair.”)
And that is the story of how my dad’s friend got stabbed by a righteously pissed-off deer.
Wide Spread Interests 