We all know how crazy bucks get during the rut. (And how crazy it makes hunters, to be fair.) But what happens when the size of that cervid increases by almost 10-fold? Chaos.
Bull moose can weigh up to 1,500 pounds with a rack up to four feet wide atop their peanut-shaped domes. And when they’re battling over breeding rights, they don’t give a single damn where they’re fighting and what they break in the process. Holly Keintz learned this firsthand when two fighting bulls busted into her backyard in Homer, Alaska.
A video posted by Keintz on October 28 shows two huge bulls in a pretty small backyard area. They immediately break through the fence and trash the fire pit in the backyard.
“Sorry, Mom. I know you liked that fence,” Keintz’s daughter offers in the video’s audio.
But at this point, the battle is far from over. The bulls take the fight back into the yard, take down a few more feet of fence, a step railing, and more. “I wonder if this can be an insurance claim,” Keintz muses.
In the midst of the madness, the daughter calls her father and says, “Look! Go into Facetime.” It’s as if one of the bulls hears her in this moment as he stares into the camera with busted antlers and a bloodied eye.
It’s a brief pause before the violent bashing of heads continues. Eventually, the bulls make their exit, but they leave behind quite a mess. Click here to check out the aftermath.
Watching this brutal fight between bulls can be a bit shocking, but this behavior isn’t a rare occurrence. Just a week ago a pair of bulls were found drowned in a river with their horns locked together in Teton County, Wyoming.
“The two bull moose had clearly been sparring as part of the rut, gotten locked together and could not get apart,” Mark Gocke, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department spokesman for the Jackson and Pinedale regions, told Cowboy State Daily. “And my take is that they fought until they were exhausted and went down in Fish Creek and ultimately drowned.”