Definitely a trail, in fact it kind of looks like the one where I take my dog for walks :D, but most of the “cat trails” all look alike so no telling. There are a lot of those all over the place, even in the city. And yeah, Sitka (we used to call the Sicka because they’re scrawny little things) don’t get all that big.
The thing across the road looks like a downed tree branch, probably birch since it’s so white.
So while perusing Google in relation to this story, I came across this photo. Who knew that moose were used as draft animals?! And what a beast!
:eek:
I hear moose bites can be nasti.
I cannot imagine a moose doing this willingly.
There’s been at least one case in Maine of a moose being using as a draft animal. It was raised by humans and was paired with a horse, IIRC. Not the best draft animal, mind you, but certainly an interesting sight.
That one is, IIRC, photoshopped. At least the logs are (Just compare the left and right lower corners of the photo. They’re the same, only mirrored). Dunno about the elk, though. Elks in harness is not an unheard of thing.
We apologise for the fault in these posts. Those responsible have been sacked.
This is indeed a photoshop - Is This a Photo of a Moose Harnessed to Haul Lumber? | Snopes.com
But as the links at the bottom of the snopes page show, moose can be harnessed and used for draft animals, although who knows how well-behaved they were.
Looks about right to me, and I’ve seen LOTS of bull moose. Looks like the camera angle is from a kneeling position, but the scale is fine.
Bull mooses are known to attack trains while in rut - I think I’d pass on harnessing up those beasties.
Maybe someone already included this link, but I found a link to a webpage that discusses the controversy around these photos.
Here I go again…I think what is really bothering me about that moose’s legs is that in the first photo the lower front legs are a soft dark grey, and in the second they are definitely black. If the photo was taken from the same location, at the same time of day, wouldn’t the leg colors be the same? The second photo looks like the legs have been re-colored to a darker shade. The first photo looks genuine to me, but the second looks weird - and it isn’t the size of the moose, that I totally believe.
I received this in an email a couple months ago and think it’s real.
If there is something fake about the photos, my guess would be that it’s a stuffed moose (or some other life-like statue) that was posed, not that it’s a photoshopped picture.
No comment on the picture being legit or not, but a quick moose story seems apropos. My MIL lives in a small town about 45 minutes outside of Montreal. Once when my wife went up to visit she was stuck in traffic for 2 hours because someone had done an accidental test of the, “Who wins in a fight between a full sized pickup and a moose?” rhetorical question, and it took that long to find and bring in the right piece of heavy equipment to move the carcass.
I am of the opinion that the photos in question are not Photoshopped. For one thing, I am pretty good with Photoshop and photography in general and have some understanding about how to tell if a pic is fake or not. Looking at those pics casually, I see no obvious signs that they are faked.
But the main reason I think they are real has nothing to do with any technical analysis of the pics.
When people fake a photo, they generally include something in the photo to cause “shock and awe”. This is usually pretty ham-fisted (like a tiny VW or wee little human next to the moose) but sometimes it’s a bit more subtle.
In the case of these photos, any size reference is so subtle as to leave no purpose to faking the image to begin with-- there is really nothing in the pics that makes the moose appear to be ridiculously big. The only thing that comes close to being useful as a comparison for judging the animal’s size is the road, and there is just nothing obvious enough about the road’s size to clearly indicate that the moose is some freakishly large animal. As for the talk about tree sizes, that’s a non-starter unless you know exactly where the photos were taken.
Why fake a photo if your fake doesn’t even clearly make the statement that it is somehow remarkable? IOW, I just don’t see any reason WHY someone would work so hard to fake these photos. Just like solving a crime: first, there has to be a motive.
It’s simply too difficult to get a sense of scale with the ambiguous points of reference in the original photographs. You need points of reference whose size you are familiar with to accurately gauge how big our moose is.
Yes. And that’s why I find it very unlikely that someone would fake a photograph of an abnormally large moose without bothering to include a point of reference that’s a universally known size.
PS-- that second picture with Jabbar in it was obviously photoshopped!
Damn it. I should have caught the mirrored logs myself. :smack:
I still confess that I’m a bit disappointed.
Well, no, neither of my photos was Photoshopped, I can assure you. But, I do admit that I’ve engaged in a little deception in my posed shots. In the first shot, our moose was posed alongside a Giant Tit Mouse: an exceptionally large rodent who often reaches a shoulder-to-ground height in excess of 3 meters. In the second shot, our moose is posed alongside Timmy Abdule Jabbar, Kareem’s younger midget brother: 32 inches and known for his unique high contrast, hyper-saturated appearance and his knack of casting no shadows.
Moose are ridiculously huge. They average 6-7 ft tall at the shoulder after all.
