Moose tramples and crushes Iditarod dogsled team in Alaska

An Alaskan woman training her dogs for the Iditarod race was attacked by an angry moose with her dogs trampled on and left seriously injured.

In a Facebook post, Bridgett Watkins shared her experience of the day a moose charged at her and her dogs while she was training them through a 52-mile run on 3 February.

While moose sightings in Alaska aren’t that uncommon, they rarely attack humans unprovoked.

Ms Watkins, a 38-year-old musher, initially thought when she spotted the moose that it would go way, she told local media outlets.

Ms Watkins, along with her friend and handler Jen Nelson, was running her sled dogs in the interior Alaska’s Fairbanks area. The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race is an annual long-distance sled dog race run in early March from Anchorage to Nome in which 14 dogs run for miles for 15 days or more to reach the finish line.

She was midway through the training run when she noticed a moose along the Salcha River trail system which had shed its antlers. Her dogs were tied to the snow machine.

“I had given this moose lots and lots of space,” Ms Watkins, who has lived in Alaska all her life, told Outdoor Life.

However, soon the large bull hid amidst the trees and reappeared, eventually coming just a few feet away from the team. This triggered Ms Watkins to take out her gun and fire a few shots to startle the animal.

“I was like, Well, he left again. I guess I’m just going to sit here and wait. We have to wait a while and make sure he’s gone. It wasn’t 10 seconds later that I looked up and he was charging full speed right at me,” she told the outlet.

“I even said to myself, Take a deep breath. Steady yourself. I was aimed and waiting – hoping he’d deflect – just steady. I let him get close,” Ms Watkins told Outdoor Life.

However, the moose didn’t stop. Ms Watkins, a part-time emergency room nurse, fired five times at the charging moose which became entangled with the sled dogs, the report says.

Ms Watkins said she quickly cut six dogs loose and they managed to flee. However, the dogs hooked to the sled were trampled by the moose.

The bull stood over them, stomping them for hours, she said.

“I have never felt so helpless in my life,” she said in a Facebook post. “He would not leave us alone and he even stood over top of the team refusing to retreat.”

Ms Watkis said a friend then reached them and killed the animal. But many of her dogs suffered serious injuries and are fighting for their lives.

The animal was fairly distant, she told local media outlets, so it didn’t worry Ms Watkins, who has been an Alaskan all her life and owns Kennel on a Hill.