A moose regularly petted and hand-fed lettuce and potatoes was shot this week after it stomped on a 6-year-old boy in a Muldoon neighborhood.
An Anchorage police officer shot the young, male moose after the boy was safely in a neighbor's home at the Rangeview Mobile Home Park, a densely packed swath of about 75 trailer homes with few trees or woods or even yards.
The boy suffered a split lip and minor headache, police said.
"As usual, it's people that have caused the problem and the moose that suffered the ultimate consequence," said area wildlife biologist Rick Sinnott, with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
According to interviews with kids and adults in the mobile home park, police were summoned after school Monday after Peyton Huisingh was injured.
Peyton said that about 3:30 p.m. he went to see if his friend Austin Roehl wanted to play. He walked over to his house, several mobile homes away, marched up the porch and knocked on the door. This was often the after-school routine for the boy.
Jacqueline Roehl said she opened the door and told Peyton that Austin was sleeping. She closed the door and started walking toward the other end of her house when she heard Peyton scream, she said.
She said she looked out her living room window and saw the moose coming from around the corner of a nearby trailer. It was going straight for Peyton, she said, shaking when she recalled the story.
The moose was quickly on top of Peyton, she said. She threw open her front door and screamed. She grabbed snow boots and sneakers stacked next to the door and began tossing them at the animal.
"I told him (Peyton) to get under the porch," Roehl said. After about five pairs of shoes, she was about to go for a kitchen stool when the moose looked at her and stopped. Peyton scrambled to the porch and they went inside.
The boy had been kicked in the head and was crying.
A police officer shot the 700- to 1,000-pound moose while waiting for Fish and Game to arrive. The animal was acting aggressively, police said, and they couldn't wait.
Sinnott said he would have shot it too.
"It was just a matter of time for this to happen," Roehl said. The day before the stomping, she said she saw the moose on her neighbor's tiny porch. The neighbor had enticed it with some food and was able to even pat it on the head.
Peyton's father, Damian Worel, said the same. Just days before the attack, Worel said, the moose had come next to their fence and the kids were petting it. He said he didn't feed it, though.
Neighborhood kids told similar stories. One child said his mother feeds the moose tomatoes. Another said the moose was fed leftovers.
"People have been feeding it cabbage and lettuce and putting foodstuffs out for it. It's very sad," said Daelyne Ford, office manager for the mobile home park. Ford sent around letters last summer to residents advising them not to feed the moose.
Ford said some kids in the neighborhood had been antagonizing the moose, throwing snowballs and rocks at it.
"This moose had been fed for some time," Sinnott said. If people start giving food to it, it goes to the next person and expects that person to feed it as well, he said.
"It's like a switch in their brain. They come up to you, expecting to be fed and when they don't get the reward, they flip their switch and kind of go crazy. It's a really dangerous place to be," Sinnott said.
This is the roughest time of year for the Anchorage Bowl's estimated 700 moose, he said. "They are sick and tired of winter. They are hungry and tired and have lost probably several hundred pounds of weight. So they are potentially quite cranky," he said.
Sinnott said moose probably charge hundreds of people every year in Anchorage, but only about half a dozen people are injured enough that they need medical treatment.
Feeding moose is illegal and abusers face tickets of $110 if caught, he said.
Daily News reporter Megan Holland can be reached at mrholland@adn.com.
