It’s not a good thing when a dog walk turns into a dog run, am I right?
This couple would certainly say no after they got chased into their home by an elk as they were finishing up a walk around the block with their dogs. You wouldn’t think of an elk to be all that aggressive, but videos like these goes to show that the National Park guidance about staying “25 yards away from animals” are put in place for a reason.
Elk are a lot bigger than people think of them to be, and I’m not sure why that is the case. People are always amazed to see how big animals out in the wild actually are, like when this moose went viral recently for eating some leaves off of a snowy tree.
Male bull elk can stand as tall as six feet, and weigh anywhere between 700 and 1,100 pounds. Females, on the other hand (or hoof), usually reach about four and a half feet tall and weigh somewhere around 500 pounds. The clip below features a female elk on the attack, and though it’s smaller than its male counterpart, the size of this animal is still nothing to sneeze at.
So imagine having something that weighs around 500 pounds sprinting right at you. Wouldn’t be an ideal situation, would it? Especially if you have a couple of dogs to worry about in addition to yourselves, like this couple did.
The dog walker was keeping a close eye on the elk as it trailed along behind them and their dogs. Luckily for them, they were very close to their home when the female elk went into a full-on charge, and snuck in through the door in the nick of time.
As the door closed, the cow elk was just inches away, even partially making its way up onto the deck when it charged. The video suggests that the female elk was more aggressive towards the couple because it had just given birth and saw the dogs as threats to her offspring.
Take a look at the heart-pounding video below:
