Nature can be brutal, which is exactly what one young bear found out when an angry moose chased the terrified animal out of a lake onto dry land, only to chase it around until the frenzied bear barreled straight into a cabin window while trying to escape.
There’s nothing funny about the crazed chase or the poor bear crashing into the opening.
What is amazing, though, is the fury of the largest and heaviest members of the deer family and how terrified the bear was, which we think of as apex predators. Evidently, they are no match for an angry moose with a bee in its bonnet.
An extraordinary video captured a year ago starts as the two animals come rushing out of a lake.
You can hear a high-pitched squealing or keening noise initially, which must have come from the panicked grizzly before it is seen careening around the corner of an unidentified building.
As it rounds the blindspot, you quickly see the irate moose charging from the rear. Now, both grizzlies and moose can attain speeds of 35 mph, so the race is nearly neck and neck.
As the bear is fairly small in stature for a grizzly, one could assume it was a female or perhaps a young male who hasn’t quite reached maturity.
Due to the video’s starting point, it’s impossible to know what provoked the moose to go to such lengths as to drive the bear out of the water where it was presumably hunting or maybe just going for a dip on a particularly warm day.
As the pair race up and down the street, and the bear is obviously tiring, he or she must have been able to sense their attacker was gaining on them when they made an abrupt zag to the right, which brought them directly on course with a closed window. The sound of the crashing glass and the bear bouncing backward before fleeing in the opposite direction is gut wrenching, but it at least appears that the moose had lost interest by this point.
The video, while difficult to watch, is an excellent reminder to humans that moose and elk are nothing to mess with, and that if they’ll chase down a grizzly bear, they’ll certainly have no compunction about pursuing you. The moral of the story is back off and give wildlife the space and respect they deserve…or suffer the consequences.
This article by Rebecca West was first published by The Animal Rescue Site. Lead Image: PIXABAY/ENLIGHTENING_IMAGES.
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