Friday, May 14, 2010

Close Encounters of the Antler'd Kind

Mark Steyn mentions his near-miss with a moose. Good thing he managed to avoid a collision, because those beasts are humungous, and many a motorist in moose country has been crushed under its enormous weight or decapitated by an impressive set of antlers. I well remember when we were in Newfoundland--which hasn't the highest per capita moose population in the world, the animal having been introduced into the province some years back and having no indigenous predators--the road signs warning drivers to be extra vigilant for moose; apparently, their peak hours for road crossing are dawn and dusk, good times for humans to be somewhere--anywhere--other than in a car. I also remember the advice we were given by a local: If you happen to encounter a moose and can't avoid hitting it, whatever you do, don't slow down. If you do that, you're likely to get an rack of antlers coming through the windshield, and it'll be game over for both man and beast. No, (counter-intuitively) the best thing to do is speed up, hit the animal in the legs, and hope that the impact hurls the creature over the parts of the car containing passengers.

Barring that, you can always shoot it, a la Woody.

Update:

Moose + moose = moose, which is nice,
Tho' mouse + mouse isn't mouse, but mice.
Not to mention the louses--
Lice when they're in your houses,
And not, you'd have thought, in your hice.

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