ShareThisBy DAVID CHANEN
Thursday, November 16, 2006
As they drove down Interstate Highway. 494 in Minnetonka, Minn., during rush hour Thursday, Patty Raymond told her husband she had just spotted a moose.
"Whatever," he responded.
She wasn't the only one. More than 30 people called 911 about the huge animal, which had ambled across the highway and somehow avoided vehicles before heading to a nearby frontage road.
It kept moving, and Scott Carlson, a veteran Department of Natural Resources officer, feared that the young moose might wander back into traffic.
With no way to capture the moose quickly, Carlson shot the moose. He could only speculate why the moose came to the Twin Cities.
He said it is incredibly unusual.
"The moose was young, and it's breeding season," said Carlson, who has been with the DNR for 25 years. "This (killing the animal) wasn't a pleasant thing to do."
The Safari Club International will pay to process the moose into meat that will be distributed by the Second Harvest Heartland food shelf. Carlson said that the animal weighed between 500 and 1,000 pounds and that the DNR will test it for diseases, but that they are confident the meat is OK.
Before the moose crossed 494, many employees at a nearby Cargill site saw it up close and personal. Dawn Horarik said the moose was magnificent.
"One of my colleagues saw the moose and said something about it, but we all assumed she was talking about a mouse," Horarik said.
Carlson considered ways to capture the moose, including tranquilizers. But they wouldn't take effect for 15 to 45 minutes, and "he could go a lot of places during that time," Carlson said.
Carlson is trained to deal with "nuisance animals" such as deer and raccoons, but had never dealt with anything the size of a moose.
"Every few years, you hear about a moose wandering south as far as St. Cloud, but very rarely to the metro area," he said.
