Moose dies after getting tangled in cords of snow-making machine at Colorado ski area
A moose got tangled in the cords of a snow-making machine at a Colorado ski area and died, wildlife officials said.
Employees at Keystone Ski Area recently found a dead moose tangled in cords, Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials said.
“Unfortunately, the moose did die from capture myopathy,” officials told McClatchy News in an email. “The meat from the moose was donated to a local nonprofit.”
Ski area workers found the dead moose and dragged it down the mountain behind a truck, The Colorado Sun reported. The resort reported the death, and wildlife officials investigated the incident.
Capture myopathy happens when an animal is struggling to escape capture and dies. The animal gets so stressed and tried to break free, but the movement causes it to get more entangled.
“It is a lot of stress when an animal gets caught like that, they working hard putting in energy to break free,” Parks and Wildlife spokesman John Livingston told KDVR.
The company that owns the Keystone Ski Area told The Colorado Sun that workers had never seen animals tangled in snow-making equipment before.
“This was a sad and rare accident. Even still, we are looking at more we can do in the future to prevent rare events like this from happening at all,” Lindsay Hogan, a representative of Vail Resorts, told the news outlet.
Animals are regularly getting tangled in cords, fencing and nets in Colorado.
On Sept. 13, a bull elk was spotted wandering a Colorado highway with 30 feet of fencing wrapped around its antlers.
Wildlife officials tracked down the elk and tranquilized it to remove the fencing.
“A CPW wildlife officer tranquilized the bull elk so it could be freed of the fencing entanglement and released outside of the intersection to its natural habitat,” officials said in a news release.
This story was originally published September 21, 2022 at 10:17 AM with the headline "Moose dies after getting tangled in cords of snow-making machine at Colorado ski area."