A woman and her husband travel to a wildlife preserve. Both having lucrative careers, they book an expensive cabin from which to take wildlife tours. The wife brings a camera to get close-up shots for her work. She wants to film a cow moose and her young calf. A ranger warns her not to get too close. She argues with the ranger, saying she wasn’t too close and knows animals, and asks to speak to his supervisor, who tells her the same thing.
A while later, she sneaks behind some trees to get a close shot of the cow moose and her calf. She stops at what she thinks is a close, safe distance to the cow moose, but she doesn’t recognize movements by it, signaling it’s getting enraged.
A cow moose can weigh over 900 pounds and stand 6 feet from the ground to its shoulder. Thus, an enraged cow moose is something you should get away from pronto. But the woman, oblivious to the cow moose’s simmering anger, began to take the photos. At that same moment, the cow moose charged her, closing the distance between it and the woman in seconds. It rammed its 900 pounds into the woman’s body, slamming her to the ground, barely conscious, her wind knocked out of her body. It struck her with its hooves repeatedly, breaking bones and crushing organs. It stopped its attack when the woman, unconscious, was no longer a threat to her calf.
The woman’s husband and a ranger rushed to her aid after the moose was gone, but she remained unconscious and close to dying. The medical staff at the preserve tried to keep her alive and airlifted her to a hospital, but she died on the way there.
As often happens in these deadly encounters where people are killed by wild animals on wildlife tours, she thought she knew better than the rangers and didn’t follow the rules.
Bob Boyd