People sometimes forget that the world isn’t a petting zoo.
I’ve seen a lot of people flood the comment section of wild animals videos asking the question “if not friend, why friend shaped?” Obviously, a moose isn’t “friend shaped” as much as some other animals that live out in nature, but this video is a showcase of why you shouldn’t ever assume any animal out in the wild is your “friend.”
Especially when your dealing with more potentially aggressive animals like bears, bison, deer, or in this case, a moose. If you didn’t know, moose are the largest member of the deer family, which is just a mundane way of saying that the 1,500 pound animals can really bring the pain if they ever want to defend themselves.
Typically, a moose will choose the “flight” option in the fight or flight response. They’d generally much rather avoid confrontation, though they will occasionally charge without much thought if they feel immensely and promptly threatened.
That’s what happened in this video out of Canada when some snowmobilers spotted a moose on the trail they were riding on. One of them idiotically decided to get off their snow vehicle and approach the moose, presumably to pet the beast. That ended up easily being the guy’s worst decision of the day, and likely his life.
It didn’t take long for the moose to go into self defense mode. In the blink of an eye, the large animal had the man knocked on his rear end in the snow, and that was just its opening move. The man tried to get up, but the moose still felt unsafe, so it trotted over to the guy with his butt in the snow and started throwing nasty hooves.
The snowmobiler exhausted all of his options attempting to get away, but nothing could put distance in between himself and the towering moose (not even his friends yelling). He even started crawling through the snow after getting pelted with relentless hoof kicks, though that only set him up for a nasty, gruesome injury.
Unfortunately, his desperate escape led to one of the man’s legs being exposed on its own, and the moose honed in on it. In one quick extension of the moose’s back leg, the man’s leg was snapped right around the knee, and the person filming quickly pulled the camera away afterwards.
The video isn’t for the faint of heart, but it is for those who weirdly enjoy watching people get what they had coming to them:
