70-Year-Old Woman Attacked By Moose While Starting Car
Would you punch a moose in the face? What if it was standing on top of your mother? That’s the bizarre situation Shawn Tuffnell of northern Canada faced. He decided to go toe-to-toe with the huge animal.
On January 22nd, temperatures in the village of Bienfait fell to -48 degrees. While Shawn Tuffnell was still making his lunch for work, his mom went outside to start the car. He heard 70-year-old Angie shout, and assumed she was reacting to the weather. Then she shouted again.
Tuffnell remembers the sounds became “way scarier.” So he ran to the door.
The moose attack
“I opened the door, and then seven or eight feet from the door there was a three-year-old bull standing on top of her.”
So what in the world do you do? Tuffnell yelled at the animal. So he stepped up and punched it in the nose. It barely noticed him. He scooped up a shovel and hit it until it got off his mother, and attacked him instead.
The moose charged Tuffnell, slamming him against the door frame, and head-butting him in the stomach. Repeatedly. He suspects it broke at least one of his ribs. But he didn’t give up.
“I was screaming for my mom’s boyfriend to wake up and bring me a gun over and over again.”
Shooting the moose “So that it couldn’t go after my mom”
Unfortunately, the gun in question was just a .22 caliber. Not nearly large enough to take down big game with just one shot. So Tuffnell aimed for the animal’s eyes, to blind it “so that it couldn’t go after my mom.”
He remembers putting 15 small bullets into the animal before it finally fell. “Finally I got through to the brain and dropped it,”
His next move: Help his mom get out of the -48 degree weather. He scooped her off the pavement and helped her inside. Then he returned to the moose to “put it out of its misery.” He “reloaded two or three more 10-shot clips” and emptied them into the moose. He realized later he fired 40 bullets in 90 seconds.
It turns out the moose was a small three-year-old male: “Pretty skinny, so he was probably close to starving.” Conservation officers took it into the city to test it for rabies. But Tuffnell doesn’t expect they’ll find anything. “Everybody keeps saying that he must have been sick…They’re just dangerous, period.”
The family discovered the moose had slept against the side of the house, on top of their warm dryer vent. “We saw his tracks where he walked through the yard first, and there was no real good shelter the way the wind was blowing…and then it was just perfect. No wind right in that corner.”
Tuffnell doesn’t seem to regret killing the animal. He said of its death. “Wasn’t much suffering or anything worse than what we went through.”
Meanwhile, he’s focused on recovery. His rib is “Pretty damn painful.” But Angie has a three-inch cut on her calf, bruises on her ankle, ribs, and even forehead. “We had to do, I think, eight internal stitches and then about 20 on the outside to stitch that up.” And after a surprise moose attack, some of the damage doesn’t show. “My mom’s pretty traumatized being chased down by the moose.” Understandable. But at least she had a quick-thinking son around to save her life.
