Undertoad • Oct 19, 2004 12:37 pm
Geodog points out this remarkable one... thanks!
If it's an animal image, and it's not Friday, it's not gonna be good. And that's the case here, as this moose was eventually destroyed. But he's alive in this shot...
Very similar to 1/15/2003: Dead deer mystery, except in this case we kinda know what the full story is.
This moose was happily minding his own business. And his business was kicking the ass of any other moose in the area. He was in "full rut", a condition in mating season in which a male moose is so horny and full of piss and vinegar that he will pretty much fight any other male moose in the area.
Unfortunately he is a moron, and so sometimes he will pick fights with things that aren't other male mooses but kinda sorta LOOK like other male mooses. Anything that looks like another set of antlers and moves. Pissed as hell, horny as hell, dumb as a stump... we've all known guys like that, and the destruction they can cause.
OK. Now, PAUSE a moment and consider stringing up electrical cable over long distances. As tw ponts out, maybe the lines should be buried. But when they're stringing across the Alaskan wilderness, where there's basically nothing, it'll be a lot cheaper to do it this way.
They've come up with an interesting way of stringing the cable, too. They lay the cable out along the ground, and then climb the poles and hang the cable through an eyelet at the top of every pole. At that point, the wire runs along the ground, except to where it rises up to the top of each pole. They leave it like that, and when they've strung FIVE MILES that way, they just PULL the ONE END of the cable, roll up it with a huge winch, and the five mile long cable is pulled, up from the ground to taut on the poles, with 5000 pounds of force. Cool!
Linesmen came through here and rolled out the cable in this way, days earlier. And then, from miles away, they started to pull the line. And this dumb moose saw this large movement, and decided it was fightin' time. But he proceeded to lose the battle spectacularly, as his antlers got caught up in a cable, and Mr. Moose got slowly dragged up in the line as a winch pulled it from miles away!!!
Fifty feet up, hung by his skull, barely alive, horny, pissed... by the time they got him down, he was thrashing about. They couldn't get him free, and figured he would die if they tranquilized him. In utilitarian Alaskan fashion, they decided that the best approach would be to just shoot him and donate the meat to a local needy guy. And that's what they did.