“I thought it looked pretty bad so I called the police who sent out an on-call hunter. But while we were waiting, the neighbours and I started to saw down some of the branches and then the hunter arrived with a saw as well,” said Johansson. The group tried to make the elk more comfortable but to no avail. It wasn’t until the fire brigade arrived on the scene and managed to bend the tree to the point where the exhausted elk could slide out of the branches that the animal was finally freed. According to Johansson, it looked very much like the elk was severely drunk after eating too many fermenting apples.
Drunken elk are common in Sweden during the autumn season when there are plenty of apples lying around on the ground and hanging from branches in Swedish gardens. While the greedy animal was reaching ever higher to reach the delicious but intoxicating fruit, it most likely stumbled into the tree, getting itself hopelessly entangled in the branches. And from what Johansson could gather, this particular animal had been on a day-long bender. “My neighbour recognised it as the animal that almost ran into her car earlier in the day. She was pretty sure the elk was already under the influence,“ said Johansson.
When the inebriated elk was freed, it lay for a while on the ground, seemingly unconscious. After emergency services had ascertained that the animal was still alive, Johansson was told to keep an eye on it and call the hunter straight away if it seemed to be suffering. But by the morning the hungover animal had stood up and cautiously moved a few metres away. After a while it went on its way, although Johansson suspects it is still skulking around the neighbourhood. “We often see elk stuffing their faces with apples around here but this is the first time we found one perched in a tree,” he said.
9 comments:
I'm pretty certain that's a moose, not an elk. Take a look at the nose.
The Swedish word for moose is elg, that is a moose for sure.
The animal known as moose in the North America is called elk in Europe.
Is it? Huh...
You'd think people over here would have brought that habit along with them.
A moose once bit my sister...
Well, one could speculate the early settlers of America hadn't really have contact with European elk, since they mostly live in the north and east of the continent. In the New World, they named the first large deer they encountered elk, and when they then saw moose, it was too late to start calling them elk.
That's what is says in Wikipedia, but that's weird in itself; the North American elk (Wapiti,) is mainly on the western end of the continent; you'd think an explorer landing on the east side would have stumbled onto a moose before they found the wapiti. 3500+ kilometers of untamed wilderness to travel, and they missed a moose the whole way?
Someone must have been spectacularly drunk to produce that big a fuckup.
Or maybe they simply called them both elk until it got too confusing and moose was taken into use. I seem to remember the word was borrowed from the Native Americans.
Yeah, from the word 'Moosu' in one native dialect. I can see the settlers opting to take Moosu over elk, seeing as they likely had native guides doing the hunting for them. It would have filtered into general usage and eventually replaced the original appellation...
But why wouldn't 'wapiti' have done the same?
Post a Comment