Yikes! Yaks and Moose on the Loose!

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 27, 2000 | by Stephen Goode

Two big-game stories came for the people's recently from the Associated Press set this column wondering how one handles 1,000-pound critters. No answer was forthcoming, except "carefully."

Two cases in point: An 850-pound moose got into a family's swimming pool in North Adams, Mass., and in Whitefish, Mont., three yaks (yes, yaks, those long-haired critters from Tibet) got loose and set off a wild yak hunt. They hadn't been seen since July 4 when a fireworks display caused them to bolt.

As for the moose, Hulda Jowett of North Adams looked out her window one day in October and saw the bull moose standing thigh-deep in her pool, calmly drinking. She called the police. But a medley of wildlife officers, firemen and city workers with a back loader arrived and proceeded to shoot the beast with a tranquilizer gun.

Undazed at first, the animal jumped onto the pool deck, then began to fall asleep. But when its would-be rescuers started to strap it up to move it out the big buy bolted from what had appeared to be a comatose state and fell back into the pool, this time in the deep end. A firefighter jumped in, got the animal in the loader and it was lifted out to be set free in the nearby Berkshire hills.

As for the bull yak and two yearling heifers in Montana, when finally located -- after nearly a four-month search -- the animals were loaded into a horse trailer, but just barely. "Loading the yak was like a bullfight experience," said yak wrangler Dianna Kindle. "You could be gored at any time. The bull was eyeballing everything and everyone. There was a weariness all around by the end of the hunt."

Bull yaks can weigh 1,200 pounds.

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