Good God, Don’t Hit a Moose with Your Car

If you’ve never seen a moose, do. They’re giants. A bull can weigh 1500-lbs and stand damn near 7-feet tall. Up close they seem larger. Elephantine. Handily the second-largest animal walking around North America, the long gangly legs of a moose make it seem like a car could whiz right underneath their broad ribs. As this video shows, they cannot.

Something about the calm and smooth movements of moose makes them disappear into their surroundings. Even this monster of a fellow, standing out in a Colorado meadow, would be challenging to see for a motorist when he made his way into the highway-side brush. It’s no excuse for clipping too fast through a National Forest, but we’ve all done it. We’ve all had that moment with a deer, or a coyote, or an elk. Fortunately for this moose, the driver of this Jeep got good and hard on the brakes. After a dramatic and seemingly impossible somersault through the air, the big fellow walks away from this accident. Surely beaten, surely sore, but alive.

The Jeep didn’t fare much better. Despite weighing three times as much as a moose and having momentum and engineering on its side, the Grand Cherokee was left undrivable after the impact. Windshield stove-in. Hood a wrinkled mess. The poster of the video reports that all the Jeep’s occupants were okay. We imagine they were quite shaken.

It’s a dramatic reminder. To slow down. To take in your surroundings, pay attention to the roadside. And maybe to make a point of looking for moose instead of finding them by accident.