582: When the Beasts Come Marching In

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass.

Ira Glass

I'm in suburban Connecticut and an 83-year-old man, Dick Paterniti is showing me the holes that woodpeckers have made in his house. For over two decades, he's been replacing shingles and patching these holes. For over two decades, he has been aggravated by their birdy jackhammer noise. For over two decades, he's tried all kinds of things to get them to leave his house alone. Like, for instance, the plastic owl that he bought.

Ira Glass

He hung the owl on the rope and pulled him side to side, using the pulleys. He did this because he learned, through bitter experience, that just putting the owl at the top of a ladder didn't work. After about a week, the woodpecker realized that the plastic owl was not a threat to it in any way. And it not only returned, once Dick came outside and saw the owl and a woodpecker--

Ira Glass

This man, Dick Paterniti, was at IBM for years-- did integrated planning and strategic planning. And when he latches on to a problem, he takes it on with a breathtaking thoroughness. Regular listeners to our program might remember his years' long search to figure out the origin of a piece of music that he would hear when he was put on hold at his local hospital. And he's tackled this woodpecker situation with a kind of "leave no stone unturned," 1960s engineering mentality that got a man on the moon.

He showed me articles-- highlighted in multiple colors-- about the birds. He showed me a table full of gear and chemicals, foam to fill holes in his house, aluminum flashing. But also metal pie tins that he would hang from strings and colored streamers, on the theory that that scares woodpeckers away.

Because everybody knows woodpeckers hate tacky [BEEP]. They like a nice, classy house. Kidding.

Ira Glass

His latest idea? While the woodpecker's been away this winter, a hawk showed up in his yard. Hawks are natural predators for woodpeckers. Just hearing a hawk's call, he thinks, should be enough to scare woodpeckers away.

Ira Glass

Which, of course, raises the question, how exactly do you form an alliance with a hawk? Stocking his yard with mice or with rabbits seemed to Dick like it crossed the line into crazy town. Putting up peanut butter might just attract rats. And do hawks even eat peanut butter? So Dick's backup plan, if the hawk doesn't stick around for the summer, is to rig up some kind of audio playback gear and a loudspeaker to play prerecorded hawk sounds.

Ira Glass

Dick's son told me Dick overthinks everything. And the bird doesn't think anything at all. The bird doesn't care. And that's maybe why the bird is winning. The bird's in charge.

Today on our program, "When the Beasts Come Marching In," we human beings think we run the world. We think we've got things under control.

And then an animal shows up and things do not go like we planned. We have three stories today-- seals and wolves and a moose dropping in on our human lives and showing us who is not the boss. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, "Beaching and Moaning." And even when an animal is not a pest-- not chewing up homes, not spreading disease, not biting average citizens-- even when an animal is pretty much universally loved, it can still wreak havoc when it arrives in our world. James Spring has this example.

A community of seals-- harbor seals-- in La Jolla, California near San Diego. Note that the version of this story that we're putting online and as a podcast includes some curse words that we have unbeeped. If you prefer a beeped version of our show, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. Anyway, here's James.

James Spring

I feel like it all starts with their little noses, so cute. Soft and rubbery like a pony's. And their stubby flippers. Their plump little bodies like speckled bean bags.

Visitors come from all over the world to watch the harbor seals of La Jolla wiggle across the white sand of a little beach called Children's Pool. It's called Children's Pool because back in 1931, the city built a seawall along a curved peninsula to make a protected cove for children.

And it totally worked. I played there when I was a kid. I didn't drown even once.

There weren't any seals back then. But later, in the mid-'80s, when I was a teenager, they started to come ashore at night. Just a few at first, and then a bunch.

One night my friend Tom and I ended up at the Children's Pool after a Wang Chung concert. Don't judge me. It was late. I feel like there were maybe 20 seals on the sand.

And I sat down next to the small one. He looked up at me and I reached out with my hand and then he totally leaned into it with his neck, like a cat, and I thought, oh, rad. The seals like us.

Then I went away to college to become a marine biologist. It didn't work out. Then a whole bunch of other stuff didn't work out, either, and I moved away. And when I came back years later, the Children's Pool was a very different place.

James Spring

The beach is only 150 feet wide and by the winter of 2010, it was covered with seals. They'd pretty much taken over half the sand and established a permanent rookery here. That's what it's called-- a rookery. It's where they give birth and nurse their pups.

And people loved to come here and sunbathe and swim and take selfies with the seals. And everybody seemed happy. Except for this one group of activists that believe that humans shouldn't be on the beach at all. That it was bad for the seals.

Some of them wore these matching blue shirts and they had laminated badges. They looked official. They'd patrol the sand, calling themselves docents, like in a museum.

But they were really there to discourage people from putting down their towels and coolers. They'd tell visitors that the seals needed to be left alone. Then they'd try to shame them into leaving, or at least keeping their distance.

James Spring

The activists set up camp on a sidewalk at the top of the steep steps leading down to the sand. They just had a folding table with signs and flyers and they would yell down at anybody they thought was too close to the harbor seals. They also used video cameras to document people getting close to the animals and then they'd upload the videos to YouTube and Facebook, like the ones you're listening to right now.

James Spring

Brian Pease is one of the leaders of the seal activists. But he's not one of the yelley ones. He's more deliberate. An attorney who founded the Animal Protection and Rescue League after he moved here 12 years ago.

James Spring

Flushed is actually a scientific word. When the seals get scared, they all do this sort of wiggle stampede back into the water. Biologists call it flushing. And to Bryan and the other seal activists, flushing the seals is abuse, especially during the pupping season, when the mothers are nursing their young.

James Spring

Flushing the seals is also illegal. It's a violation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, a federal law that prohibits the hunting and harassment of any marine mammal. That part about harassment, though, is where interpretations seem to vary. Because when the seals flushed, they always came back. The harbor seal rookery here was thriving.

Most people liked the seals. Locals had been sharing this beach with them for 20 years. But now these activists were walking around with megaphones, telling everybody that they couldn't be down on the sand or in the water, yelling. And if anybody disagreed with the activists or their methods, they were branded seal haters.

Some of the locals began to talk about how to best handle this. They decided to form their own group, set up their own tables at the beach with their own flyers and banners. Their goal in all of this was just to make sure that the beach stayed open to people, that they could keep sharing it with the seals. And these newly minted "shared use" advocates-- they were done taking orders from the seal activists. So if you happened to show up at the beach on a Saturday with your kids and a picnic basket, you would see the two opposing sides-- pro-seal and shared use. And they were ready to rumble.

James Spring

This is that pro-seal attorney guy, Bryan Pease.

James Spring

This is how it usually went down. Talking led to yelling and the yelling led to just a cacophonous din of outrage. It seemed like everybody in San Diego took a hard-line stance and they all fell into one of these two camps.

Both sides dished out a lot of propaganda. The shared use people would say that the seals were never in any jeopardy-- that the activists' crusade was nothing but an elaborate scam. Here's a shared use guy talking into the camera of a seal activist.

James Spring

This was a common claim made by the shared use people-- that the whole pro-seal movement was just a way to rake in a bunch of cash. Bryan Pease, the pro-seal guy who started the Animal Protection and Rescue League, says that the money collected through donations was barely enough to hire a nighttime security guard.

But the other part is kind of true. The seals were not endangered. In fact, on the International List of Threatened Species, harbor seals are classified as a species of least concern-- the exact same designation that's given to the common pigeon and to the house rat.

But the rallying chant of most seal activists was that shared use is abuse-- any shared use. And that the shared use people were animal haters-- that they just wanted the seals gone. But if you actually talked to a shared use advocate, they'd tell you something different.

James Spring

This is Kent Trego. He's a consultant at Coastal Environments and he started a research based organization called the Nautilus Oceanic Institute. He's published more than 50 scientific papers. He also swam at the Children's Pool as a kid back in the 1960s. He's been sort of a voice of reason for the shared use side.

James Spring

The seal activists, he means.

James Spring

A pro-seal activist.

James Spring

There were definitely times when you'd see kids in the videos walk right up to the seals and try to pet them. And the pro-seal activists would lose their minds.

James Spring

As the years dragged on, more and more of these confrontations were ending up in court. And Bryan Pease began to spend a lot of his time there defending pro-seal activists who'd been arrested or had been issued citations. He was also bringing civil cases against the other side-- shared use advocates who'd been arrested during confrontations with pro-seal folks.

At a certain point, he stopped going to the Children's Pool altogether. He says it just stressed him out too much.

James Spring

Kent Trego, our marine sciencey, shared use guy, didn't engage in all the fighting, either. He just tried to educate the public with a little logic and some biology 101. And he went about it in sort of a quaint, bygone way that he hoped might rise above the shouts of the angry mob. He wrote letters to the local editors. The papers printed the letters with Kent's name and his title. And then the hate mail started to roll in-- threatening phone calls and emails-- by Kent's count, more than 200 of them.

James Spring

At the height of the conflict in 2013, the San Diego police department responded to 227 calls at the Children's Pool. And it seems like neither camp was really consulting the dictionary before they tossed around words like abuse and harassment and assault. In one video, a cop arrives on the scene to find a shared use lady in her 60s and a Middle Eastern guy holding a skateboard and a camera.

The lady's saying that the seal activists are blocking her from sitting on a bench. And the skater's filming it and she just glancingly brushes the camera away. And the cop's watching all this happen.

James Spring

That's the cop. He's being sarcastic.

James Spring

The cop, at this point, has had enough.

James Spring

Everybody was filming everybody. It was like a stand off with camcorders and cell phones. A bunch of videos just show a close up of a face holding a video camera pointing right back, filling the frame. It's like the worst art film of all time. Like in this video, a shared use guy is being all pushy with his camera.

James Spring

The two sides became so fixated on their hatred for each other that in a lot of videos, they don't even mention the seals. One morning, it's cold and foggy on the beach, and a 70-year-old pro-seal activist just has had enough of a shared use guy who's filming her and she charges right up to his camera.

James Spring

At a certain point, the factions had been battling so long that they knew each other by name, knew where each other lived and worked. And the attacks were becoming more personal, the threats more vicious.

James Spring

People on the shared use side had always accused the seal activists of valuing the lives of animals over people. And now, the sentiment began to ring more true. This one's a little hard to hear.

James Spring

He said, "don't get too close to the seals or I'll make your life miserable."

James Spring

"I'll bring my guns here."

James Spring

And "I'll fuck you all up." Throughout this war, the pro-seal camp had a unique weapon on their side-- the power of the federal government. And at some point, they really began to brandish it. The feds could arrest or issue citations to anyone who violates the Marine Mammal Protection Act. So the seal activists would film people as they harassed the seals or drove them from the beach.

James Spring

And then they would keep the camera rolling and they'd get all shaky--

James Spring

--as they chased the lawbreakers all the way back to their car.

James Spring

--to record their license plate.

James Spring

And then when they had it, the activists would turn over the video to the National Marine Fisheries Service and the feds would issue fines of $500 to anybody who made the seals flush. It was an incident like this one that brought the seal war to one of its darkest hours.

James Spring

One day, Bryan Pease received an email that was addressed to one of his volunteers. It was a threat. The volunteer, a young woman who's identified only as "witness" in the federal court documents, had filmed the license plate of a pair of scuba divers who'd flushed some seals when they came up on the beach. Bryan read me the email.

James Spring

The email continues, "Many of the local divers have close friends in the California motorcycle clubs. Motorcycle club members have been contacted about witness and she will be dealt with very harshly, if she is not killed. They know that if she's not in San Diego, she may be found in San Francisco.

Either San Diego or Oakland hit hogs will be involved in her punishment. She's brought this on herself." And then it's signed "Biker Bobbie," with an I-E. Probably the least threatening Hell's Angels nickname of all time, but still.

James Spring

Biker Bobbie emailed two other threats to the Animal Protection and Rescue League. In one, he threatened to burn down the organization's storefront and to bomb a coffee shop. Bryan Pease turned the emails over to authorities.

The female volunteer-- the one who was singled out with the death threat-- the one who'd sent the video of the two scuba divers to the National Marine Fisheries Service-- she was considered a federal witness. And threatening a federal witness is a federal crime so the FBI got involved. They tracked the email sender's IP address to a public library about five blocks away from the Children's Pool. The feds had Biker Bobbie in the crosshairs.

James Spring

And when they confronted the author of the emails, it turned out he was not an actual biker, nor was he a Bobbie. He was a scientist.

James Spring

It was our marine science guy, Kent Trego.

James Spring

Kent remembers being at the Children's Pool on that day when the seal activist filmed the license plate of his two scuba diver pals. But he says he doesn't remember much else. He couldn't tell me any details from that day. Says he can't remember what he wrote in the emails. Even talking about it now-- it makes him squirm pretty good.

James Spring

Things started to come into sharper focus after he was arrested by federal agents as he walked back to his car from the beach. Kent pled guilty to the charge of threatening a federal witness. He served four and a half months in federal prison and then another six months of house arrest. He was banned from using a computer for a couple of years and ordered to stay away from the Children's Pool.

He took full responsibility for his actions. He apologized to the victim in court. He sent a letter of apology to the Animal Protection and Rescue League.

I tried to push Kent for details-- for an explanation-- just why he did it. Was there a chain of events? A final straw? He couldn't really give me a clear reason.

James Spring

I do know because I'm a human being. And really, who hasn't taken things a step or two further than maybe they should have? Like one time-- I've got this neighbor. He's a half block away from me. And on hot summer days, he'd blast his music really loud and it was always Alice in Chains, a band that I used to love before this.

Anyway, my daughter Addie-- she was less than two-- 18 months. And she was a light sleeper. And it was already hard to get her down for naps. And then Alice in Chains would start rattling the neighborhood.

Addie starts crying, so I run to the neighbor's house and pound on the door. The guy doesn't answer so I call the cops. They show up and shut the neighbor down.

The next day, same thing. It happened, like, six more times. Eventually, the cops stopped responding and nobody else seemed to care. And the sound blasting out of the neighbor's stereo made something come loose inside me.

I went to my bedroom and unlocked my gun case and I loaded a revolver. And I walked out in my backyard to the corner closest to the music and bam, bam, bam, bam. I fired four shots into the dirt.

My wife is screaming at me and it hits me all at once. I'm the guy who's terrorizing the neighborhood. My wife didn't speak to me for a week.

So I get it. Everybody has their limits. All of us.

James Spring

Yep. Even our animal-protecting, confrontation-avoiding attorney, Brian Pease. One of his fellow seal activists-- a woman-- had been raking seaweed one day at the Children's Pool, trying to create a mound or a barrier so she could tell visitors to stay behind it. And there was this 55-year-old shared use guy who was kicking away the seaweed line and just being a jerk.

James Spring

This thing, being the stun gun. Now, Brian went out of his way to explain that it wasn't technically a stun gun. This point was really important to him.

Says he had an expert witness declare it not a stun gun. But it says stun gun on the package and that's how the newspapers reported it. In any case, when he got down to the beach, the seaweed kicker confronted him.

James Spring

Anyway, the two men grappled and went to the ground.

James Spring

Bryan was the one who was arrested. He pled no contest to assault with a stun gun. Bryan's a smart guy and super thoughtful. But I think he got caught up in his herd's mentality and people here forgot that there are more options than just fight or flight.

James Spring

This is Kent again. And on this point, both men agree.

James Spring

In the summer of 2014, the California Coastal Commission voted to completely close the beach at Children's Pool to humans during pupping season, from December 15 to May 15. Bryan and Kent both support this decision. Anybody who wants to see the seals can still watch them from the sidewalk and the seawall.

And it works. People aren't screaming at each other. Seals aren't being flushed from the beach.

During the rest of the year, there's a permanent guideline rope down on the sand to provide a buffer between humans and harbor seals. It's not perfect, but it's a pretty good compromise. Some of the seal activists are still patrolling the beach during the seven months when it's partially opened to the public. And some of the shared use people are mounting a legal campaign to have the Coastal Commission decision overturned. But mostly, it's just nice now.

James Spring

The thing that you don't hear in all those YouTube videos is the sound of the place without the hate, when people are not screaming. When the sun is shining and the seals are sprawled out across the white sand.

James Spring

Sometimes you see a mother nursing her pups. It feels like you're being let in on a secret, like this is how the world is without us. We, as a species, are aggressive.

We're predatory, territorial. We're pretty selfish. And here at the Children's Pool, we've got the place surrounded. The seals keep coming back. Clearly, they like it here.

James Spring

And even though I don't have any evidence or scientific data to prove it, I still think that the seals totally dig us, despite our natures.

Ira Glass

James Spring in San Diego. Since we first aired this story a year ago, a group of the shared use advocates sued the city of San Diego to get the beach opened up again year round to humans. A judge ruled in their favor last May. The city appealed that decision and was granted the right to close the beach this winter while the court case plays out.

Coming up, the most successful animal outlaw the range country out west every knew. And by that, I mean the animal itself was seen as a criminal. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, "When the Beasts Come Marching In." We have stories of what happens when animals intrude on the world that we humans have constructed for ourselves. We've arrived at Act Two of our program.

Ira Glass

Act Two, "Hungry Like a US Department of Agriculture Contract Employee." OK. Back in Act One of our show, we heard about modern people trying to accommodate the wild animals that just show up in their midst. But of course, back in the day, generally, a wild animal showed up, we would just kill it. Take, for example, this press release that the federal government put out nearly 100 years ago.

Michael Chernus

"US department of Agriculture press release. Monday, January 17, 1921. The Custer Wolf is dead.

He was the master criminal of the animal world. For nine years, this wolf had lived as an outlaw. The cruelest, the most sagacious, the most successful animal outlaw that the range country had ever known. His cruelty was surpassed only by his cunning. Here tonight, tomorrow night he'd devastated a range half a hundred miles away."

Ira Glass

Yes, this is an actual press release from the federal government about the government hiring a guy to kill a wolf. Actor Michael Chernus read it for us. And OK, some context. Wolves used to be common in the mountains out west.

But when settlers arrived, we killed off the animals that wolves used to feed on-- bison, elk, deer. And so the wolves turned to livestock-- our livestock-- for food. We were not into that at all.

So ranchers and the federal government set out to exterminate the wolves. Between 1883 and 1930, more than 80,000 wolves were killed for bounties in Montana alone. And the governor wanted everybody to know what a good job they were doing for the taxpayers. And so they put out press releases that include facts, but do not seem constrained by facts. Though it does seem true that this wolf was really good at being a wolf.

Michael Chernus

"He loped through every kind of danger and spurned them all. He sniffed at the subtlest poison and passed it by. When he killed for food, he took only the choicest animals.

But sometimes, he killed in atrocious ways for the mere sake of killing. Often he wounded cattle, breaking their legs, biting off their tails, mutilating them in unspeakable ways. And there was no man throughout that region who did not feel a shiver run down between his shoulder blades when, alone or in the dark, he thought of this gray devil of the desert.

Four years ago, his mate was killed. He never took another. And many people supposed that he devoted himself to revenge for her death.

Later on, he attached to himself two coyotes-- not his equals, but his servants. He never permitted them to come near him and they could feed from his kills only after he himself had finished. They traveled far out on his flanks, giving him warning of ambush or approaching danger, and adding to the atmosphere of mystery that surrounded him."

Ira Glass

OK. I'm just going to jump in here again. This is the federal government sending this out as a press release. And it says they took nine years to capture this wolf.

The wolf operated around Custer, South Dakota. And the fact that they gave him a name-- "The Custer Wolf"-- that was something they did with a lot of notorious wolves back then. So how did it take nine years?

Well, the press release explains the bounty started at $100. And trappers tried, sportsmen tried. They used poison, they used dogs. Nobody could kill this wolf. They raised the bounty higher and higher, year after year, till it was $500.

And eight years in, in March of 1920, USDA's Bureau of Biological Survey went to a hunter named HP Williams, who I'm picturing-- actually, I'm picturing the shark hunter in the movie Jaws, though I have no facts at all to support that.

The government goes to him with instructions to stay with the wolf until the wolf is killed no matter how much time it takes. Williams went.

Michael Chernus

And since there is involved in this story the reputation of two geniuses, the criminal genius of the wolf and the protective genius of Williams, it may be just as well to let the account proceed in the language of the animal inspector who reported the facts to the biological survey. Like most outdoor men, he did not want to talk in heroics. Here is the story.

Quote, "When Williams first went into the country where the wolf ranged, he tried to find fresh tracks, but without success. He asked some of the men who had lost stock just where the wolf made his headquarters in their section. Contrary to their advice, Williams went into the hills west of Pringle and found that the wolf was staying around some old dens in Pilger mountains.

Williams scented up the soles of his shoes and started stringing out his traps. The wolf got on his trail that night and showed signs of great excitement at what he thought to be the presence of a possible mate in his neighborhood.

On April 1, Williams had his first glimpse of the wolf. He wasn't able to get a shot at him. The coyotes were acting as bodyguards, traveling from 100 to 200 yards on the flanks of their mother. They would warn him of danger by taking flight.

For a while, Williams did not shoot the coyotes, hoping that he would get a chance at the wolf without having to give him warning by the shots that would be necessary to dispatch his bodyguard. Finally, realizing there was no chance of getting at the wolf unless the coyotes were killed, Williams shot them hoping that he, then, had a clear field. In this, he was greatly mistaken.

The wolf played hide and seek with him. After making a kill, he would go on some distance, back trail for a few rounds to a point where he could keep undercover and watch the hunter on his trail. Though this is a common habit of a bear, I have never before known a wolf to do it."

Ira Glass

The press release continues with more detail about the hunt. My favorite scene in this whole thing is in August. The Custer Wolf vanishes for over a month.

And then Williams trails him to a canyon and is right about to shoot him when two guys on horseback ride in at, quote "breakneck speed," to inform Williams about another animal that was killed by the wolf. And Williams motions for them to go away, but they don't understand what he means. And so basically, they make so much noise, they scare away the wolf and Williams loses the wolf again. A month later, the wolf gets his foot caught in a trap, but not completely, and he pulls it out. This happens again in October.

Michael Chernus

Williams finally got the wolf on October 11. Here is his own account of it. Quote, "He stepped into a trap in the morning and it got a good grip on him. He broke the swivel of the trap and ran on with it on his front foot. I trailed him three miles and got a shot at him and got him. He's been so lucky that I expected the gun would fail to shoot, but it worked OK."

Ira Glass

The Custer Wolf was smaller than the average male wolf. It weighed 98 pounds. It measured just six feet, tip to tip. He was an old wolf, with fur that was almost white. His teeth, the press release notes, would have been good for 15 years longer.

Thanks to Laurel Braitman, who told us about this press release. It's kind of a famous one among wolf people, apparently. She's writing a book about animal outlaws.

[WOLF HOWLING]

Ira Glass

Act Three, "Weeknight at Bernie's." So after all these stories of conflict between humans and animals, let us close out our show today in a city where people actually take pride-- many of them do, anyway-- in being able to co-exist side by side with wild animals. It is actual city policy to try to co-exist. That utopian place-- Anchorage, Alaska, a town of 300,000 that bear and moose wander through. There are beluga whales in the water on the edge of town.

But most of the animals-- they come and go. And nobody knows them well. Nobody remembers them when they're gone. John Mooallem has the story of one animal that stood out-- that became a resident of the city in a way that few non-humans ever do.

Jon Mooallem

Stop me if you've heard this one. A moose walks into a bar--

Jon Mooallem

That's Rick Sinnott, and that's the call he got late one night about a moose hanging out at a bar in downtown Anchorage-- a martini lounge, actually. The moose was humongous. It wasn't supposed to be at a martini lounge because it was a moose.

Rick was the guy you'd call for problems like that. For 30 years, his official job description was Wildlife Biologist for the State Fish and Game Department. But really, he saw himself as a referee. All around Anchorage, Rick says, you've got this endless scrimmage playing out between people and wild animals all trying to live in the same space.

It was up to Rick to manage that coexistence. And he'd get dozens of calls a day-- 800-pound black bears on people's decks, wolves eating dogs. Years ago, there was an infamous spate of attacks by a cantankerous great horned owl who kept dive bombing skiers with its steak knife talons. But lots of calls didn't really seem like problems Rick needed to rush out and solve.

Jon Mooallem

Still, a moose at a bar is a higher order of moose problem. The animal could flip out.

Jon Mooallem

So Rick got in his truck and headed over to Bernie's. The place isn't the least bit secluded. It's right in the heart of downtown Anchorage, across from the Nordstrom's.

And yet, when Rick showed up, the moose was just standing there in the courtyard, stock still, unfazed, even with a crowd of people around it. It was strange. This moose seemed to require zero personal moose space.

Jon Mooallem

Yeah. The moose was hammered.

Jon Mooallem

It's not uncommon, apparently. In winter, when there's only twigs to eat, a thick carpet of fallen fruit-- even rotting fruit-- is a pretty big caloric bonanza for a moose and they get plastered. A few years ago, reports surfaced from Sweden about a small gang of moose hoodlums drunk on crabapples, terrorizing homeowners. Outside the bar, Rick and a local newspaper reporter, named Julia O'Malley, sized up the situation.

Jon Mooallem

Rick let the moose sleep it off. It was all he could do. Julia wrote up the incident in The Anchorage Daily News the next day-- a page one story. She gave the moose a nickname.

Jon Mooallem

The drunk moose instantly became a local celebrity in Anchorage. It was a kind of municipal spirit animal. People started calling Rick all the time just to say they'd spotted Buzzwinkle clodding around Anchorage. Nothing Rick needed to do, they were just excited-- a star sighting.

As it turns out, though, Rick was into this moose before he was famous. At the bar that night, he'd noticed an orange tag on Buzzwinkle's ear, the kind Rick attaches every time he handles a wild animal. When he got back to his office, he looked up the tag number.

Jon Mooallem

It had happened in the dead of night. Sounds a bit pathetic. Rick remembered how this swing kept lazily knocking into Buzzwinkle's head as the moose lurched and shrugged, trying to unsnag himself.

Ultimately, Rick had to dart Buzzwinkle with a tranquilizer, then patiently unravel the whole tangle. It was like working through a pair of knotted up ear buds, but the problem was messier-- moosier. And Rick remembered bailing out Buzzwinkle one other time in the same neighborhood. He'd been hitting the crabapples that night, too.

Jon Mooallem

Turns out, this is another common moose problem. Rick saw it all the time. Moose wind up staggering around Anchorage with long trains of Christmas lights trailing behind them, or coaxial cable, or big yellow tether balls on ropes. Gradually, Rick pieced together that Buzzwinkle was probably the same big bullmoose he'd been seeing around town for years. And the reality was when he wasn't drunk, Buzzwinkle was actually a pretty canny animal. Street smart, Rick called him.

Jon Mooallem

Picture that for a second. The moose would walk across the crosswalk with the light. It's a classic story. A guy from the sticks learning the ways of the big city, keeping his head down, trying to fit in.

What kind of thing is a moose, anyway? Moose are the largest deer in the world. The big ones can stand six feet tall at the shoulder and weigh 3/4 of a ton. People like to call these animals distinguished and noble, but they make terrible moaning sounds, like phlegmy old men with gout.

I don't know why, but I just think moose are super weird. Lots of people do. Go look at one.

They have ridiculously huge heads with gawky antlers-- almost flat in places sometimes, like broad, buckled sheets of plywood. It's insane. It's amazing the animals don't fall over. And you know how big their brains are? The size of an orange.

It just seems so odd that nature would make these hulking, vacant things and leave them standing around all over the place. And then, surprise, they can kill you. These dumb, agoraphobic vagrants with quick tempers and malfunctioning jackhammers for legs.

In a way, it'd be safer and easier just to shoot them all. And to be totally clear, killing animals was part of Rick's job sometimes. But Anchorage is willing to put up with a lot more than most places before it draws that line.

One in 10 residents in Anchorage have smacked into a moose with their car. And still, a survey Rick did found that most people-- 87%-- felt these animals, quote, "Make life in Anchorage seem more interesting and special."

It's the same basic rules for animals as for people. As long as you don't hurt or threaten anyone, you can be as eccentric as you want, or even totally annoying, if that's your nature. You can stand on the sidewalk huffing and smelling gross and making upsetting noises.

You do you. Society will do its best to tolerate you. And sometimes even send out a caseworker in the middle of the night to help you if, say, you get your giant head stuck in a swing.

A couple of months after the night at the martini lounge, Rick started getting some calls from concerned residents that Buzzwinkle looked hurt. He was walking funny. So Rick went to check on the moose. He found him at a creek behind an industrial area in town.

Jon Mooallem

Rick figured if Buzzwinkle could hang on till spring, when there'd be more plants to eat, he'd have a shot at recovering. For the rest of the winter, when people called in Buzzwinkle sightings, Rick always asked them, how does he look? How is he walking?

But then, someone reported a bull moose crumpled on the ground. Rick found the animal in a vacant lot behind a printing business.

Jon Mooallem

Rick wrote an essay about Buzzwinkle in The Anchorage Daily News, a kind of eulogy. I asked him to read his description of what happened next.

Jon Mooallem

He was at least 13, Rick says. That's how I first heard about Buzzwinkle, reading Rick's memorial to him in the paper. The emotion of it stuck with me-- the deep humanity of their relationship-- even though one of them was a moose. You can almost imagine it as a buddy film, though with a pretty twisted turn. Rick was the wingman who'd spent years looking out for his wilder, fun-loving, inebriated bro until all that hard living caught up with the guy and Rick had to shoot him in the face.

Still, even that seemed like such a courageous act of mercy, of respect, performed with stoicism and a sense of duty. And when it was done, Rick wrote, he made special arrangements to use the moose's meat in a conservation research project. Buzzwinkle would be bait for trapping wolverines.

I thought about that image a lot. I love the idea. Because in my mind, wolverines were the opposite of the caricature Buzzwinkle had become. He was goofy and urban and out getting tipsy, closing down the bar, whereas wolverines are nasty and elusive and relentlessly wild. Carving up Buzzwinkle for those animals seemed like a way to restore his wildness, to release his energy from our crummy world and feed it back into his. And anyway, the only other option would have been to haul Buzzwinkle to a landfill and that didn't sit right with Rick.

Jon Mooallem

I kept pressing him, but he said it was a mistake to over romanticize this one moose just because it had a funny name. There were so many mooses Rick had known. He would come into contact with 20 different ones a day, easy.

And I realize, he seemed to see each of those animals the way I saw Buzzwinkle-- as an individual. When Rick said Buzzwinkle was no different from other moose, it didn't cheapen Buzzwinkle. It elevated moose.

Ira Glass

Jon Mooallem. He's a writer at large for the New York Times Magazine and the author of the book, Wild Ones, where, among other things, he writes about a moose that Thomas Jefferson felt a need to send to France.

[MUSIC - "ANIMAL - MARK RONSON REMIX" BY MIIKE SNOW]

Ira Glass

Well, our show was produced today by Mike Meek, a human being, with our production staff, Zoe Chace, Sean Cole, Neil Drumming, Stephanie Foo, Chana Joffe-Walt, Jonathan Menjivar, Robyn Semien, Alyssa Shipp, Matt Tierney, Nancy Updike, and Diane Wu. Our senior producer for today's show is Brian Reed. Our editor for this episode was Joel Lovell. Research help today from Benjamin Anastas and Christopher Swetala. Music help from Damian Graef and Rob Geddis.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life was delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, Easter's coming up-- not that far away. But I am not going to give that man another chocolate bunny because the way he eats chocolate bunnies-- it is just too intense.

Michael Chernis

Breaking their legs, biting off their tails, mutilating them in unspeakable ways.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.