Yellowstone National Park is home to over 70 mountain peaks, upwards of 60 different types of mammals, and a seemingly unlimited amount of morons that visit the park each and every year.
You’ve probably seen plenty of videos of people walking right up to wild animals in the famous national park, and you’ve most likely seen a lot of those incidents end unfortunately. This video is another one of those “what were they thinking” moments, but the main character of the story does have more of a defense than others usually do.
In the clip, a Russian tourist is seen walking right up to three moose who were bedded down in the snow in the Lamar Valley portion of Yellowstone. That area inside the park is known to be buzzing with wildlife, so the moose being there is not the surprise in this clip.
The surprise is actually two-fold. First off, a person is willingly and possibly unknowingly putting themselves in harm’s way by approaching three wild animals at once. It doesn’t take a math genius or a rocket scientist (or a moose expert for that matter) to know that you shouldn’t approach three moose, let alone even one.
Secondly, the tourist that walks up to the three moose is apparently Russian, though their idiotic actions make me think that they are at least 20% American. Many who have viewed the video have defended the actions of the tourist since they are from a different country, but to play devil’s advocate, people in foreign countries surely aren’t just walking up to wild animals too are they?
I thought that was some sort of “right of passage” for Americans. A “we fought for our freedom, and we have the freedom to be as stupid as we want to” kind of thing. It’s honestly somewhat comforting to know that people from other countries do idiotic things too.
And shoutout to “Tourons of Yellowstone” for plugging in the song “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” which is actually credited to Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. If we were all going to see a Russian tourist get attacked by a moose around Christmas time, they couldn’t have picked a more fitting song to overlay onto the footage.
You can view the ill-informed animal encounter in the video below, which was captioned:
“This touron walked out to 3 bedded moose in Lamar Valley who immediately stood up when they saw him approach. When the moose stood up the touron backed up a bit but stayed to get more pictures.
We also saw him driving off road in his SUV rental. We spoke to him about the park rules and found out he was a Russian tourist.”
The dude also took his rental SUV off-road…
And for those who are saying “they should put up warnings in languages other than English” in the comment section, why even bother? Americans aren’t even following the guidelines written plainly in their native language…
