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British Columbia's chief conservation officer says tips are coming in about the identity of several boaters seen harassing a swimming moose before one of them jumped on the animal's back for a ride.

Doug Forsdick says that while a YouTube video posted Saturday shows the men laughing at their friend's apparent exploit, he found it hard to watch because the moose would have been stressed.

Forsdick says an investigation is underway but that he couldn't say when the video was taken or provide the exact location of the incident, somewhere on a northern B.C. waterway.

He says harassment of wildlife is a serious offence and carries a minimum fine of $345, but the cost of such behaviour can go up to $100,000.

Forsdick says moose usually like to stay away from people and there have been other incidents involving boaters who try to chase the animals or herd them back into the water.

He says that could lead to the death of a stressed-out animal or cause serious injury to people who need to be educated about public safety around wildlife.

The man could face animal-harassment charges in B.C., but would likely escape the threat of prosecution for a similar stunt in another province given Canada's patchwork of animal-rights laws, an expert said Tuesday.

While B.C.'s chief conservation officer said the culprit appears to have committed a serious offence that carries a hefty fine, the Animal Alliance of Canada said the province is one of the few Canadian jurisdictions to have clearly defined rules against harassing animals.

Similar rules are in place only in Alberta, Ontario and the Yukon, while Manitoba and Nova Scotia have less stringent regulations, said alliance director Liz White. Other provinces and territories do not address the issue in their various wildlife acts, she said.

Punishment would be unlikely to come through the Criminal Code either, White said, since it deals only with the more serious offence of animal cruelty and riding the back of a moose would likely fall short of that high threshold.

Still, the man's actions would be seen as harassment by nearly any standard, she said.

"We're trying to teach people to respect (animals)," White said in an interview. "Care for them, love them, observe them, enjoy them, but don't harass them and don't get near them. It sounds like this person who did this should heed that advice."

The B.C. Wildlife Act forbids anyone from behaviour that would "worry, exhaust, fatigue, annoy, plague, pester, tease or torment" an animal. Trapping and hunting, however, are explicitly allowed.

Some provinces take a different approach: Manitoba, for example, only prohibits harassment from vehicles, while Nova Scotia's laws apply primarily to dogs.

In 2013, a similar incident in Ontario offered two men a hard lesson in the potentially high price of animal harassment. They were fined a total of $2,500 after being captured on film using a boat to repeatedly circle a cow moose swimming in a northwestern Ontario lake. One man then leapt onto the moose, prompting the animal to flee into the woods but causing no lasting injury.