Woman Fined for Petting Moose

Despite warnings from others on the street, one woman was determined to approach and pet a wild moose she encountered in the town of Breckendridge, Colorado. Now she's paying the price. Fortunately she wasn't injured when the moose kicked at her, but she was fined by Colorado Parks and Wildlife for harassing wildlife after footage of the encounter was shared in the news and on various social media platforms.

According to CBS4, the CPW asked the public for help identifying the woman, whose name has not been released. The CPW said the same moose has been spotted wandering through the downtown area on several occasions in recent days.

Wildlife managers explained to the news station that getting too close to the moose is not only dangerous for people, but could end in the animal being euthanized. So far they have no plans to relocate the moose because it hasn't shown real aggression, but that could change if people refuse to give the animal its space.

CPW officers and Breckenridge police are trying to keep tabs on the animal, and police have been dispatched in past days to work crowd control around the animals.

Dangerous wildlife encounters regularly take up a big chunk of my blog space, and many of those encounters are the result of people intentionally getting too close to wildlife. I recently wrote about a woman petting a wild bull elk, and here is video footage of a man and woman petting and feeding a wild deer. In this blog a child is tossed into the air by a bison, and here I wrote about a woman being attacked by a bull elk. There are plenty more. The moral of the story is that nothing good comes from getting too close to wildlife, but we all know that people will continue to push their luck.

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