In Brief

Man Captures Stunning, Rare Video of a Fight Between Two Huge Moose

There's something stoic and strangely serene about the affects of two moose in a video posted to Facebook Tuesday. The two bulls stand there, eyeing each other, not moving much. And then, with an enormous clatter, audible even far up the road, they ram their antlers together, thrusting and bucking. Each appears determined to drive the other to his knees.

And then they come apart, and stand there some more, sometimes kicking at the dirt, sometimes still. This lasts for several long moments before they collide again. The pattern, captured by New Brunswick resident Denis Levesque, repeats itself over and over for 10 minutes before, after a particularly nasty-looking scrap, one of the animals breaks off and runs into the woods while the other briefly gives chase. More than half a million people have watched Levesque's original video as of this writing.

Levesque reportedly told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that as a forestry technition and hunter, he knew he was seeing something rare and special.

"I had goosebumps on my back," the CBC quoted him as saying. "I've never seen something like that, and I'm always in the woods."

Moose are the largest animals in the deer family and the tallest animals in North America, but Levesque told the CBC he wasn't sure exactly how big these two bulls were. He estimated their antlers as being at least 50 inches (127 centimeters) wide. He also refused to say precisely where the video was filmed, to protect the animals from hunters.

Originally published on Live Science.

Rafi Letzter
Staff Writer
Rafi joined Live Science in 2017. He has a bachelor's degree in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of journalism. You can find his past science reporting at Inverse, Business Insider and Popular Science, and his past photojournalism on the Flash90 wire service and in the pages of The Courier Post of southern New Jersey.