Watch a Grizzly Bear Chase Down a Moose Calf (With an Instagrammer In Between)
The calf is as good as dead meat until some motorists with a phone camera show up. Should they have intervened?
It’s perfectly reasonable to ask whether social-media-obsessed humans should be sticking their phone cameras in the middle of the natural world’s life-and-death struggles. And the last place you might to get a well-reasoned, level-headed answer is on social media.
This was proven again recently, when an Instagram user that goes by “natureismetal” posted a video of a grizzly bear in the process of talking down a moose calf. In the caption, the user writes: “This unit of a brown bear was mighty close to delivering the death blow to his prey, that is until this vehicle showed up and broke up the party.”
In the video, the vehicle (with camera man inside) comes upon the bear chewing on a still-kicking moose calf in the road. Startled, the bear runs off into the woods and the moose runs down the road. Before long, the bear returns, runs down the calf, and drags across the blacktop—but then abandons it and runs into the woods again as the car approaches. Eventually, the moose starts another wobbly run down the pavement towards safety and goes into the woods on the other side of the road. But the bear, a silverback grizzly that moves like a halfback, chases after it and into the woods. We don’t see what happens, but I would definitely put my money on the bear.
It the comments, someone says, “It sucks that people intervened,” which sets off about 140 back-and-forth responses. Here’s a little (unedited) sampling.
No, the people didn’t interfere.
Hey, it’s natural selection, leave them be.
These people shouldn’t have gotten so close, it’s not safe.
No they didn’t get too close, just drove slowly by.
The griz looked pretty lean and probably needs that meal bad.
I would’ve beeped try to scare the bear and help the baby moose.
The “hypocritesey” is amazing.
Yeah, but how else would we have gotten that dope footage?
To be fair to the motorists, most us probably would have slowed down and grabbed our phones, too—and in the end, the griz most likely had his meal just the same.