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September 22 2001 at 10:01AM |
A hunter in the northern wilds of Canada's Yukon Territory got the surprise of his life when the supposed bull moose he shot turned out to be not a male, nor a female, but both.
"The hunter shot it, thinking it was a bull. When he got closer, he saw that things weren't as they should have been, or as he expected," Rick Ward, a moose biologist for the Yukon government, said.
"It was a hermaphroditic moose. It was a female with antlers," said Ward, who added he had never seen anything like it in his 25 years as a biologist - of which 15 years have been spent studying moose.
"It's very, very rare," he said. "It's about the same as finding hermaphrodites in humans - very, very low odds."
The vast Yukon territory, located next to Alaska, is home to about 30 000 people, an equal number of bears and twice as many moose.
Hunting of male moose is permitted for three months in the autumn of every year, and those who shoot one can live on the meat of a single animal for a winter. But hunters who shoot cows face steep fines.
This hunter was not fined. - Reuters