Four dogs injured after moose attacks Iditarod sled

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A large bull moose attacked a sled dog team in Alaska last Thursday, injuring dogs and terrifying the rookie musher.

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In a Facebook post, Bridgett Watkins, the musher, posted photos of the moose and damaged sled, saying, “This has been the most horrific past 24 hours of my life.” In the post, she describes being attacked by a large, healthy bull moose who trampled the dogs and charged at the humans. Watkins described the ordeal as lasting nearly an hour. The moose finally stopped only after a friend came with a high-powered rifle and was able to kill the moose.

The attack happened while Watkins was on a 52-mile training run for the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, The Associated Press reported. The Iditarod starts March 5 in Anchorage, Alaska, and is approximately 1,000 miles. According to the race’s organizers, the race serves as a reconstruction of the freight route to Nome, and “commemorates the part that sled dogs played in the settlement of Alaska.”

Four days after the attack, Watkins is training with the dogs who weren’t injured by the moose. “This isn’t what I was planning for, but these dogs and myself have trained for so long and so hard for this race … when I walk back out to my dog yard and I have 12 perfectly healthy dogs out of the 16 and hey, look at me and all they want to do is run, how can I tell them no? That would be selfish of me,” she told the AP.

The four injured dogs were taken to a veterinarian in North Pole and are recovering, the AP reported.

Watkins told the AP she has been getting negative comments about what happened, and responded: “It’s not that I wasn’t prepared. I wasn’t prepared to kill a moose, that’s correct. It’s not my intention to go around in February and hunt and kill an animal. This is like worst-case scenario defending my life.”

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