Alaskan Tour Guide, Police Save Baby Moose From Drowning

Thought Question: How does showing compassion for animals reflect a person’s character?

A novelist named JM Coetzee once wrote: “Anyone who says that life matters less to animals than it does to us has not held in his hands an animal fighting for its life.”

Spencer Warren knows this firsthand. Early June 14, the Alaskan tour company guide arrived at work in the little southern town of Homer. He meant to prepare for an outdoor adventure trip. But he soon found a moose calf stuck between a float plane and the dock to which the craft was moored. The wide-eyed baby moose was frantically crying aloud. It was trying and failing to gain its footing on the slippery dock. 

Complicating matters, the calf’s mom was standing nearby with one of its siblings. Warren knew full well not to approach the struggling offspring. Mother moose are very protective of their young. In late May, a nature photographer was killed in Homer by a mama moose after he got too close to take pictures of her babies.  

So Warren stayed inside his car. He called the police as the little moose flailed in the water. When officers arrived, they parked their patrol car between the mother moose and her struggling male calf to block her line of sight. That allowed Warren and one of the officers to rush to the waterlogged baby moose.  

“You know, kind of thankfully, he wasn’t moving so that it made the rescue a little bit easier,” Warren told The Associated Press (AP). “We just lifted him straight out and put him on the dock there.”

After their reunion, the moose family wandered back into the woods.

“Anytime you can rescue a little critter, it always makes you feel good,” Homer Police Lieutenant Ryan Browning told the AP.  

Gif of moose courtesy @abcnetwork on GIPHY.