After our last posting, Maude & Nutok disappeared for another multi-hour jaunt. They came back tired, and Maude had (someone else’s) blood on her snout. For the past week since then, off-leash dogs have been disappearing down the road somewhere, rather than coming home from their walks.
The uncertainty over whether they killed the baby moose was reduced greatly on Friday. Maude disappeared again (we had been keeping her inside on walks, but Ilana is a sucker and lets her out when Greg would have kept her in), and didn’t return until afternoon. She had the partially decomposed head of the baby moose, and brought it up on the back porch. Danbo, who is good with locks but is otherwise a complete idiot (sort of a savant, I guess) unlocked the back door, and all the dogs played football with the head in our bedroom. This was all discovered by David, our tenant & summer dog-sitter, who we asked to stop by to look for Maude since we were at work.
Somewhere out there is the rest of the body, and several dogs keep disappearing during walks to, we think, have their way with it. This is all pretty gross, and unfortunate. We checked with our local State of Alaska wildlife contact, and it does not seem that we need to report this out of season killing of a moose. We do not know whether it was male or female, but it was at most a few months old.
Dogs are terrible killers, and we’re pursuing a regime of sensitivity training and, perpetually, trying to get the miscreants to come when called. Even our Zen dogs (Nonny, for example) were known killers.
When we saw the baby & momma moose, there was another baby. We hope that only one was killed.
Dogs have been coming home with body parts– moose legs to be exact.