Out Of The Wild

 

Into The Wild, the bestselling book by Jon Krakauer, which inspired the newly released movie of the same name, is the story of what happens when a young man deliberately moves from civilization into the untamed back country of Alaska. The hero of the story, as everyone knows by now, fails to successfully adapt to his new environment and dies. At about the same time as the release of the movie, another young male was moving “out of the wild” from northern New England to suffer, in the end, the same fate.

Last Wednesday, police in Fairfield shot and killed a 700-pound bull moose, apparently the same moose pictured on our front page last week. The Department of Environmental Protection had been tracking the animal as it descended deeper into Fairfield County ever since it was spotted in Newtown earlier in the week. DEP officials authorized the destruction of the moose, citing public safety concerns as it wandered closer to the Merritt Parkway. Three days later, Waterbury police shot and killed a female moose near Route 8 in that city. In June, a moose was struck and killed by a car in New Canaan, seriously injuring the New Hampshire woman who hit it.

New England has no more impressive land mammal than the moose. It stands six feet or taller at the shoulder and can weigh up to 1,400 pounds. They are majestic and revered by people everywhere as a symbol of the wild. They are very rare in Connecticut. In a typical year (this year is not typical), the Wildlife Division of the DEP reports just two or three sightings, and the size of the state’s entire moose herd is estimated at 100 to 150.

No one likes to see these animals die. But it is a dangerous business when moose and cars mix it up — for both the moose and the motorists. According to data collected by Connecticut’s DEP from other states, a car/moose collision is 30 times more likely to kill a human than a car/deer collision; one in every 50 collisions between a moose and a vehicle results in the death of someone in the vehicle.

The hard truth is that there are few good options when a wild animal of this size wanders into an area as densely populated as Fairfield County. Even tranquilizing the animals for resettlement elsewhere is fraught with difficulty. Administering sedatives with dart guns is not as easy as it appears on television’s wildlife shows, which are edited to entertain. Determining the proper dosage for the size and stress level of the animal, and delivering it to the right spot is not a precise skill. The animals do not drop immediately. They can flail around dangerously or flee, putting themselves and others in even greater peril. (The last time a moose was spotted in Newtown in 1986, it was tranquilized and transported to a marsh in New Hampshire, where it promptly died from the effects of its sedation.) And these days, New York and the other New England states are having their own moose problems. They do not necessarily need or want Connecticut’s wayward moose.

With increasing development in Connecticut and in states to the north where the traditional habitats of moose are also under pressure from development, this walking emblem of the wild is bound to come into increasing conflict with civilization. Unless we can come up with better ways to capture and transport them to safer environments, and better preserve those environments, moose will continue to be euthanized in our towns and cities. They are not giant plush toys; they are wild animals that are finding themselves increasingly under stress and in extreme situations. While it may never be prudent or possible to treat them with the outright affection we feel for them, even in their last moments, we should always treat them with compassion and respect.