What is it with Canadians and moose?
FORT NELSON, Canada — Two Canadian knuckleheads were convicted of harassing wildlife and fined $3,000 each after a video of them chasing a scared moose across a lake and one of them jumping on its back surfaced online.
Bradley Dale Crook, 31, and Jaysun Allan Pinkerton, 33, of Fort St. John pleaded guilty on Friday after investigators spent a year trying to identify them from the video which went viral, the CBC reported.
The cruel episode occurred in July 2014 on Tuchodi Lakes in Northern Rocky Mountains Provincial Park near Fort Nelson, about 900 miles north of Vancouver in British Columbia.
The video, which was posted on YouTube, shows the men aboard a motorboat chasing the terrified animal through the shallows of the lake, which one man shouts: “Wait ’til he’s swimming. Let’s get on that moose!”
As the animal moves into deeper water, one of the men leaps from the boat onto the moose’s back and rides it for about 15 seconds while the creature howls and bucks in the water.
Meanwhile, his pals on the boat are laughing hysterically, with one shouting, “I’ve never seen anything so awesome!”
David Vince of the British Columbia Conservation Service said the video represented “the ultimate form of harassment.”
“You can see that the moose is struggling with that fellow on her back. You can see the fright in her eyes,” Vince told the CBC.
The video came to the attention of conservation officials in 2015.
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