The Armory - Guns, Knives, and Axes

[apeman]

In NH climbing area parking lot at dusk, a moose walked up alongside my car (which had 5 passengers inside) and stood adjacent for a couple moments.

It was so tall that I could have opened my drivers' side door (with window rolled down) and the door would have swung under the moose stomach with clearance to spare!

So I suppose moose don't always bolt, this one came to us.

Apparently you had the good sense not to honk at it because you're still alive and posting.

Narrator: He did not fuck with the moose

[Smitty-48]

It's really only rutting season when moose get agressive, mostly they're quite docile, during the rut, which is about now, October, the male moose are on the prowl, that's when they can get agressive, otherwise, they're generally pretty docile, and the biggest danger is really just hitting one with your car when it's standing in the middle of the road, that's how 99% of people who are injured by a moose get injured, the 1500 lb moose comes through the windshield at 100 km/h.

[TheReal_ND]

Iirc most moose deaths happen when you get between the mother and her calves. They can disembowel with their front hooves.

Edit: I guess car crashes probably win out though

Also, I should add they can be quite tame. My grandma had to shoo them away from her gardens and they would stick their heads in the kitchen windows.

[Smitty-48]

I lived in up moose country for most of my career, and the only people injured by a moose that whole time, were injured in a moose related vehicle accident while driving through Algonquin Park. The moose are actually attracted to the road, and that was a serious concern in moose country, but other than car accidents by collision with one standing in the middle of the road and/or running off the road by swerving to avoid one, never heard of even one person being injured by a moose.

In terms of being attacked by wild animals, number one concern, by far and away, was bear, only thing that ever attacked anybody in the whole time I lived up north, was a bear, there was never one moose attack that I ever heard of. Black bears may be tiny compared to grizzlies, but on the other hand, they make a bull mastiff look like a chihuahua, so even being attacked by a small bear is like being attacked by the biggest meanest dog in the history of the world.

Mind you, some black bears get real big, we had a catch and release policy on the base, we didn't kill them, we just trapped them and moved them out, and the traps are large concrete tubes lying on their side with a gate that drops down, and one night I was patrolling around in the training area and just stopped by one of these traps to use it as a RV point, and I didn't even know there was bear in it, suddenly I hear this shuffling around, so I shine my flashlight to see, and good lord, he was a big sumbitch, he barely fit in the trap, it was about five feet in diameter, and he was stuffed in there like cheese in a canoli. He was about five feet wide lying down, if he was up on his hind legs, he'd probably been about eight feet tall, so getting up into grizzly sized then, the biggest of the black bears are like medium sized grizzlies.

Big ol' black bear gonna make you forget about them moose right quick, the real big ones, they can get up around 700-800 lbs, can run forty miles an hour, any tree it can't climb, it can knock it down, big ol' black bear takes a shine to yea, you got yourself a real problem, although, an artillery simulator pyrotechnic, which is like a quarter stick of dynamite, that always scared them off, BAM!, they definitely booked in the face of the arty-sim.

Even with a gun, that doesn't really guaruntee much against a bear, it's an ambush predator, and they're cunning, they don't come straight at you, they try to flank you, they'll go after the last man on the trail, because to them the trailer is the weak one, so if it's gonna make a move on you, it's gonna come blasting out of the trees without warning, point blank, from the flank/rear, and it's coming at'chas at forty miles an hour, so I mean, it can be on top of you before you even get it into your arc, so the better option is to scare them off with pyrotechnics, before they ever get into position to make their move.

Some parts of the training area were like bear-a-palooza, dozens of them hanging around in a big group, so we'd stonk the whole area with arty-sims, boom! boom! boom-boom-boom!, and they'd all take off and head for another area. They're not scared of much, being the apex predator, but they do not like loud explosions, that scares the shit out of them, you see them take off across the fields, and they don't stop running until they're out of sight all the way across the drop zone. And like I say, they're smart, so once you scare them off like that, they don't come back any time soon, cause they just figure "whatever that was, we don't want to mess with it, moving on..."

The females and the cubs all hang around in a big group, for protection from the solitary males, but the thing is, those males are actually hunting the cubs, the biggest threat to bear is another bear, so if you scare the mommas and the cubs off, the big males will follow, because in fact, that's the prey they are after.

The only thing bears can't be scared away from, is the garbage dump, garbage dump is like heroin to bears, so if you go to the dump, you're gonna be surrounded by black bears, ain't nothing gonna get them away from the dump, so the only thing there, is just to not hang around for too long, dump your garbage and go, the bear will go for the garbage, and so long as you're gone when he does, he won't chase you.

The garbage dump in Petawawa, it's actually very clean, because anything remotely biological and rotting, the bears eat all that, basically just scrap metal and assorted junk lying around, and even all that has been licked squeaky clean by the bears. If you wanna see a bear in the wild, just go to the dump up in Renfrew, first time I went to the dump, we were dumping this old fridge from the mess, and there had be at least ten bears there milling around, they all just stop and look at us pulling up, interested to see what treats we might be bringing them, it was like the McDonald's drive through for bears, in reverse, you drive up and toss the treats out of the truck, and the bears have a look to them like "thank you, come again..."

Here's the dump in Sioux Narrows Ontario, same like Petawawa, lol, look at all them chubby bears, just waiting for the next truck to pull up, tell you what, it's the good life for bears, out at the drive through;

[Ex-California]

Can you guys buy a Glock 43? The teeny-tiny guy?

Apparently its LEO-only in CA

[DBTrek]

So in Canada you don't have seagulls (dumpster chickens), you have bears.
I'd say bears can probably get rid of more organic material, but having lived in Florida I'm not so sure. Seagulls are no slouches when it comes to cleaning a site of anything and everything edible.

[Smitty-48]

So in Canada you don't have seagulls (dumpster chickens), you have bears.

Down south around the Golden Horseshoe here, it's all about coyotes, racoons, and seagulls, but drive north about an hour from here, and then you're into the wolves, bears, and moose, that all kicks in around Algonquin Park, that the major nexus of wild animals here in Southern Ontario, Algonquin Park is like 7500+ sq kilometres of wilderness, that's where the wild bunch hangs out.

Now, if you go up into Northern Ontario propper, beyond Timmins to the Sault? That's the deep woods, ain't no park up there, it's really wild up there, that's the bush you can disappear into and ain't nobody gonna find you if you do, Northern Ontario is 850,000 square kilometers of mostly woods, that's a wild bushland, the size of Western Europe.

We did this long range patrolling exercise up in Northern Ontario once, way up in the bush, dropped us in with helicopters, there wasn't even a landing zone, we had to rappel just to insert, and that's where we had our military weapons for training, but they also issued a .308 bolt and 12 gauge pump per section, with live ammo, just in case we ran into some serious predators, which up there, is the real deal.

[Otern]

It's really only rutting season when moose get agressive, mostly they're quite docile, during the rut, which is about now, October, the male moose are on the prowl, that's when they can get agressive, otherwise, they're generally pretty docile, and the biggest danger is really just hitting one with your car when it's standing in the middle of the road, that's how 99% of people who are injured by a moose get injured, the 1500 lb moose comes through the windshield at 100 km/h.

I've stumbled into a pack of moose once when walking to university some years ago. Think it was during winter though, and most of them didn't pay me any attention.

It was a bit scary though, as I came between a cow and the rest of the pack on the road. Was walking on the left side, with the majority of the pack on my left, and the cow was walking alone towards me on the right side(her left side) of the small road. When we were about to cross each other, she tried walking towards me a step or two, crossing the road towards me. Since I grew up on a farm, I just did whatever I would do to a domestic cow trying to pull some shit, and took a step or two against her too, which made her go back to the proper side of the road again, and so did I. We departed as friends.

Glad she didn't call my bluff though.

Same thing happened with a wolf once too, when I was about 16-17. But then both me and the wolf were surprised as fuck. Walked in some dense woods, taking a shortcut home. Almost no visibility since animals didn't graze there. Suddenly a wolf jumped out five meters in front of me from some dense vegetation. Just kept walking towards it without pause, saying "Hello there" (being polite towards other trekkers is pretty much built into the Norwegian mentality, so the words came out before thinking), which made it jump straight back and run away. Kept walking, thinking there's officially no wolves in these parts of the country. For the next few weeks, I would bring a small knife when walking in those woods, just in case. Didn't find the wolf again, but found some parts of a deer it had killed.

[DBTrek]

So the wolf didn't return your greeting?
What a dick.

[Speaker to Animals]

I walked with a coyote once. Thought he was a dog. He seemed pretty cool, actually.

I was like, "hey there, little man. Are you lost? You don't have a collar or tags."