When the snow gets deep and the moose struggle to find food, it’s tempting to feed them. But biologists say there are good reasons not to do that.
First of all, it’s illegal. And it can be costly if you get cited. Just ask Michelle Drury, who runs a coffee stand near the Carrs grocery store at Dimond Boulevard and Jewel Lake Road.
According to an online dispatch,an Alaska State Trooper fined Drury $320 for feeding a moose early Monday morning, Dec.11.
An AST spokesman said an Alaska Wildlife Trooper was driving by the A Whole Latte Love coffee shop, and stopped after he saw Drury throw pumpkins from her car in the drive-up lane where there were two cars in line. The trooper reported that the moose was about 15 feet away.
Dan Thompson, a wildlife biologist at the Kenai Moose Research Center near Sterling, says a lot of people don’t know that feeding a moose at this time of the year can be harmful to its digestive system.
The animals have four stomachs. The largest is called the rumen, which is like the main holding tank for everything the moose consumes. As the seasons change, so does the bacteria in the rumen. In the winter, these microbes work to digest roughage like twigs and tree bark.
“What happens is when you give them something like a pumpkin, or if they get a lot of good quality feed really quickly, when that goes into their rumen, there is a lot of bacteria and other microbes in there that start breaking that down,” Thompson said. “They produce gas as a byproduct, and it can cause the animal to bloat, which can be fatal to them.”
The trooper, after issuing the citation at the coffee stand, chased the moose into the woods and stuck around for about a half an hour to make sure it was gone.
And while this may sound like much ado about an ungulate, Thompson says moose really crave rich, high-energy foods, which creates another set of problems.
“It's just like bears. They’ll figure it out pretty quickly, and if they know that you are providing food, they'll keep coming back,” Thompson said, “and they can get very aggressive around food, just as a bear can.”
Thompson says although a moose might be friendly one minute, it’s still a wild animal.
“It doesn't take but a split second for them to go back into that mode, and they can be very dangerous at that point,” he said.
As for Michelle Drury, she says she didn’t feed the moose as the trooper claimed in his report. She says as she was unloading her van, two small decorative pumpkins fell out, which she tossed into the parking lot and suddenly a moose appeared from behind her coffee kiosk.
Drury says she plans to fight the citation. She says everyone else in Anchorage, who has left a pumpkin out after Halloween, should be fined as well. Drury says she’s heard talk radio show hosts for years encourage people to leave their pumpkins out for the moose.
And while there’s probably nothing that moose love more than to feast on Halloween pumpkins, just as it is for humans, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. Thompson says that in August and September, moose make the transition from a fall to winter diet by eating more low energy foods.
If they eat too many pumpkins, he said, their digestive systems, which are primed for winter forage, may not be able to handle all the gas it will create in their rumen. Thompson says there’s only so much bloating a moose can handle before the rumen starts pushing into other organs like the lungs, causing the moose to keel over and sometimes die, due to asphyxiation.
For those who fear that moose might starve as they fight through heavy snow and appear to have difficulty reaching their food, Thompson says not to worry, because they get plenty of high energy vegetation in the summer, which gives them the reserves they need to get through the winter.
