Put your moose to work

[Hammock Parties]

Moose logging story

We had been trying to keep the fact under wraps that with some effort you can train moose to harness. But this picture got out, it's been E-mailed around like crazy[, but no one has bothered to fill in the rest of the story so before any rampant rumors get going, I better write down what I know. If folks want to extrapolate on that, then Lord only knows where this picture and story will end up.

The man in the picture is Jacques Leroux who lives up near Escourt Station and has always had work horses, first for actual work, and then for show at Maine's' many summer fairs.

I think he had two matched pairs, one Clydesdales and the other Belgiums. He would turn them out to pasture each morning and then work them in the afternoon, dragging the sled around the fields.

Three springs ago, he noticed a female moose coming to the pasture and helping herself to the hay and what grain the work horses didn't pick up off the ground. Jacques said he could get within 10 feet of the moose before it would turn and move off.

Then two springs ago, the moose foaled at the edge of the work horse pasture and upon getting to his feet, the foal had not just his the mother in attendance but also the four horses. The young moose grew up around the horses and each afternoon when Mr. Leroux took the teams for their daily exercise the yearling moose would trail along the entire route beside the near horse.

At some point, the yearling got so accustomed to Mr. Leroux that, after he had brushed each horse after a workout, he started brushing down the moose. The moose tolerated this quite well so Mr. Leroux started draping harness parts over the yearling to see how he would tolerate these objects. The yearling was soon harness broken and now came the question of what could you do with a harness-broke moose.

As you may or may not know, a great deal of Maine is being bought up by folks "from away" and some of them understand principles of forest management. Well the folks buying small parcels of land up in the area of the Allagash have it in their mind that they don't want big skidders and processors and forwarders on their small wood lots. Enter Mr. Leroux with his teams of horses.

Every morning, when Mr. Leroux loaded the teams into the horse trailer to go off to the days job, the yearling moose got quite riled up and one day loaded himself right into the trailer with the horses! At the job site, Jacques unloaded the horses and as the moose stayed right with them, he would take the Clydesdales and his brother Gaston would take the Belgians and off into the woods they would go with the moose trailing behind. They would put the harness on the moose in case they encountered someone who they could kid with the explanation that the moose was a spare in case something happened to one of the horses. The work required them to skid cut, limb and top stems to the landing where the stems could be loaded onto a truck for the pulp mill.

All morning long the two brothers brought out twitch after twitch of stems with the moose following the Belgian team for the most part. At lunch break Jacques had the bright idea of putting trace chains and a whiffle tree on the moose's harness and all afternoon the moose went back and forth following the Belgians in and out of the woods dragging his whiffletree along the ground. As there were no stumps in the skid trail, the whiffle tree never hung up on anything and that first day in harness went great. So next day, they hitched on first a small stem and the moose brought it out just fine following the Belgians.

Mr. Leroux told me they were up to four small stems now and the moose was doing just great. He cautioned however that there were a few problems with using a bull moose. Come June, when the new antlers start, the new bone is "in velvet" and must itch like crazy as the moose stops every once in awhile and rubs his rack against just about anything to appease the itch. Once, before the brothers learned to tie him off by himself while they had lunch, the moose was rubbing his antlers against the hame on the Clydesdale called Jack and got it wedged there for a bit. Jacques said he wished he had a camera as it looked like moose was trying to push Jack over.

The other problem is the rutting season. The brothers learned quickly to leave the moose in the barn as he was constantly on red alert in the woods during this time. The brothers also considered trying this with two females to make a matched pair which would become an instant hit at the Maine Fairs. The trouble with the bulls is their racks. They would be constantly rubbing and hitting each other and Yes they would have to be gelded as I just couldn't imagine getting the two bulls anywhere near each other, let alone in harness.

So now that this picture is going all over the place, the surprise has been let out of the bag. The Lerouxs want to continue the work of trying to get a pair of females in harness but they may have to end up breeding moose to do this and that's where they will run into trouble with the State of Maine IF & W. I'm sure they don't like the idea of the brothers keeping "wild" animals.

Thought you should know the rest of the story. If any of you doubt this please contact Tom Whitworth in Ashland, Maine. I think he said he is a second cousin to the Lerouxs and has seen this anomaly many times.

Regards from your frozen, Northeastern-most state.

[Jenson71]

Holy God, I'd like to hunt that thing.

[Baby Lee]

Holy God, it's like snopes doesn't even exist.
Look at the pile of logs on the left, now look at the pile of logs on the right. Holy Crap!! It's mirror world.

[Jenson71]

I'll shoot all the moose in the mirrors, just so I could get the real one.

[Kclee]

Due to the shape of the American moose esophagus, even if it could speak, it could not pronounce the word "lasagna".

[The Dude Abides]

That entire picture is faked. Look at the antlers in contrast to the sky and trees.

[NewChief]

So sad that someone who spends the majority of their waking life online can still be suckered in by this stuff.
http://www.snopes.com/photos/animals/workmoose.asp

[vailpass]

Originally Posted by NewChief

So sad that someone who spends the majority of their life wanking online can still be suckered in by this stuff.
http://www.snopes.com/photos/animals/workmoose.asp

FYP

[listopencil]

Claim: Mister Ed, the talking equine of television fame, was a horse.

Status: False.

Although the Mister Ed television show enjoyed a five-year run on CBS in the early 1960s, it was actually one of the very first series to start out in syndication and then be picked up by a network. (Mister Ed premiered as a syndicated show in January 1961, and CBS added it to their prime time schedule the following October.) Without network backing in the beginning, however, the show's budget was extremely tight. During the filming of the pilot episode, production costs mounted as the Pssst. Listen . . . recalcitrant horse cast as Mister Ed refused to perform on cue (if it performed at all), resulting in large expenditures to cover the costs of additional training fees and wasted footage.

The producers of the show were ready to throw in the towel and write off the venture when one of the putative Mister Ed's trainers came up with a solution: the nearby Jungleland animal park in Thousand Oaks, California, had a trained Grevy's zebra that was being used in live shows for the park's daily tour visitors. The zebra (a female, called "Amelia" by its Jungleland handlers) was trained to perform many of the same actions (e.g., opening and closing its mouth, stamping its feet on cue) required in the Mr. Ed role, and Jungleland consented to lend her out for a few days' filming.

Amelia worked out fantastically well, exceeding everyone's expectations, and the pilot was quickly wrapped up and sold to the syndication market. The producers made a generous donation to Jungleland in exchange for continued use of Amelia, and she appeared in all the syndicated episodes as well as all the shows comprising the series' entire five-year run on CBS. Amelia retired to Jungleland when Mr. Ed was cancelled after the 1965-66 season, where she lived for three years before being sold at auction when Jungleland closed in 1969.

The show's premise, of course, called for a talking horse, not a zebra. The producers felt the concept was already absurd enough without stretching credulity by having to explain why someone would have left a zebra (let alone a talking one) at a country house, so they chose not to explain it at all. They stuck with the original premise instead: Mister Ed was always referred to as a "horse," and since the series was filmed in black and white, the viewing audience couldn't tell the difference.

(The difficulty in resolving closely integrated black and white images on non-color television receivers was one of the primary reasons NFL games were not regularly televised until the mid-1960s, when sales of color TV sets started to outstrip those of black-and-white models. When black-and-white television predominated in the nation's living rooms, football games were too often disrupted when players ran into the referees, whose black-and-white striped uniform tops made them nearly invisible to onlookers. Likewise, Johnny Cash's famous televised live concert performance at California's Folsom Prison in January 1968 proved disastrous when several inmates wearing the traditional black and white prisoner's garb slipped unnoticed past guards, who had been provided only black and white monitors with which to view the proceedings.)


Zebras are noticeably smaller than horses, so the set used for Mister Ed's stable was constructed using forced perspective (the same technique employed on Disneyland's Main Street) to make it appear larger than it really was (and thus make Mister Ed appear larger than he really was as well). This gimmick also helped to mask the fact that Alan Young, the series' star, was only a diminutive 5'4" tall. Since a zebra's gait is distinctively different than a horse's, the rare episodes that called for scenes of Mister Ed running were filmed in long shots using real horses, a practice which has lead to the mistaken claim (cited in several fan-related publications and web sites) that a zebra was occasionally used on the show as a "stunt double." (In later years a Palamino horse named Bamboo Harvester would often be erroneously identified as having been the Mister Ed, but this horse was in fact only used for promotional appearances and publicity stills; it never actually appeared in the TV series.)

The substitution was an open secret around the industry, however, and continual sly references to zebras were worked into the show. The two most blatant examples were the episode of 21 March 1963, "Ed the Zebra," and the episode of 17 October 1965, "Anybody Got a Zebra?" The former episode was a joke-within-a-joke wherein a disgruntled Ed ran away to the zoo, leaned up against a newly-painted black fence, and started a new life as a zebra. (Ironically, the photography crew actually had to shoot Ed's "zebra" scenes for that episode in color and then convert them back to black-and-white in order to make Mister Ed appear as a zebra to the audience!)

When CBS switched to a primarily color prime time line-up for the 1965-66 season, both they and the series' producers were faced with a dilemma: keeping the show as a black and white entry would have presented a jarring contrast with the network's other shows, but switching to color would have given away the ruse. Eventually, a CBS executive came up with a clever solution: the show was moved out of prime time into the 5:30-6:00 PM slot on Sunday evenings for the series' final year, thus avoiding the necessity of its conversion to color.



http://www.snopes.com/lost/mistered.asp

[Redrum_69]

Gochiefs moms mooseknuckle is more interesting than this story

[Baby Lee]

Originally Posted by Redrum_69

Gochiefs moms mooseknuckle is more interesting than this story

WOW!! Saw RR posted on this thread and the immediate chronology of thought was

1. RR posted.
2. Gochiefs
3. Mooseknuckle.

Your creativity is astounding.

[Redrum_69]

Yeah, my creativity is forever gone. I was going to make a prayer thread, but I just figured people would flame me.

SO what the fug is the point

[Baby Lee]

Originally Posted by listopencil

Claim: Mister Ed, the talking equine of television fame, was a horse.

Status: False.

Although the Mister Ed television show enjoyed a five-year run on CBS in the early 1960s, it was actually one of the very first series to start out in syndication and then be picked up by a network. (Mister Ed premiered as a syndicated show in January 1961, and CBS added it to their prime time schedule the following October.) Without network backing in the beginning, however, the show's budget was extremely tight. During the filming of the pilot episode, production costs mounted as the Pssst. Listen . . . recalcitrant horse cast as Mister Ed refused to perform on cue (if it performed at all), resulting in large expenditures to cover the costs of additional training fees and wasted footage.

The producers of the show were ready to throw in the towel and write off the venture when one of the putative Mister Ed's trainers came up with a solution: the nearby Jungleland animal park in Thousand Oaks, California, had a trained Grevy's zebra that was being used in live shows for the park's daily tour visitors. The zebra (a female, called "Amelia" by its Jungleland handlers) was trained to perform many of the same actions (e.g., opening and closing its mouth, stamping its feet on cue) required in the Mr. Ed role, and Jungleland consented to lend her out for a few days' filming.

Amelia worked out fantastically well, exceeding everyone's expectations, and the pilot was quickly wrapped up and sold to the syndication market. The producers made a generous donation to Jungleland in exchange for continued use of Amelia, and she appeared in all the syndicated episodes as well as all the shows comprising the series' entire five-year run on CBS. Amelia retired to Jungleland when Mr. Ed was cancelled after the 1965-66 season, where she lived for three years before being sold at auction when Jungleland closed in 1969.

The show's premise, of course, called for a talking horse, not a zebra. The producers felt the concept was already absurd enough without stretching credulity by having to explain why someone would have left a zebra (let alone a talking one) at a country house, so they chose not to explain it at all. They stuck with the original premise instead: Mister Ed was always referred to as a "horse," and since the series was filmed in black and white, the viewing audience couldn't tell the difference.

(The difficulty in resolving closely integrated black and white images on non-color television receivers was one of the primary reasons NFL games were not regularly televised until the mid-1960s, when sales of color TV sets started to outstrip those of black-and-white models. When black-and-white television predominated in the nation's living rooms, football games were too often disrupted when players ran into the referees, whose black-and-white striped uniform tops made them nearly invisible to onlookers. Likewise, Johnny Cash's famous televised live concert performance at California's Folsom Prison in January 1968 proved disastrous when several inmates wearing the traditional black and white prisoner's garb slipped unnoticed past guards, who had been provided only black and white monitors with which to view the proceedings.)


Zebras are noticeably smaller than horses, so the set used for Mister Ed's stable was constructed using forced perspective (the same technique employed on Disneyland's Main Street) to make it appear larger than it really was (and thus make Mister Ed appear larger than he really was as well). This gimmick also helped to mask the fact that Alan Young, the series' star, was only a diminutive 5'4" tall. Since a zebra's gait is distinctively different than a horse's, the rare episodes that called for scenes of Mister Ed running were filmed in long shots using real horses, a practice which has lead to the mistaken claim (cited in several fan-related publications and web sites) that a zebra was occasionally used on the show as a "stunt double." (In later years a Palamino horse named Bamboo Harvester would often be erroneously identified as having been the Mister Ed, but this horse was in fact only used for promotional appearances and publicity stills; it never actually appeared in the TV series.)

The substitution was an open secret around the industry, however, and continual sly references to zebras were worked into the show. The two most blatant examples were the episode of 21 March 1963, "Ed the Zebra," and the episode of 17 October 1965, "Anybody Got a Zebra?" The former episode was a joke-within-a-joke wherein a disgruntled Ed ran away to the zoo, leaned up against a newly-painted black fence, and started a new life as a zebra. (Ironically, the photography crew actually had to shoot Ed's "zebra" scenes for that episode in color and then convert them back to black-and-white in order to make Mister Ed appear as a zebra to the audience!)

When CBS switched to a primarily color prime time line-up for the 1965-66 season, both they and the series' producers were faced with a dilemma: keeping the show as a black and white entry would have presented a jarring contrast with the network's other shows, but switching to color would have given away the ruse. Eventually, a CBS executive came up with a clever solution: the show was moved out of prime time into the 5:30-6:00 PM slot on Sunday evenings for the series' final year, thus avoiding the necessity of its conversion to color.



http://www.snopes.com/lost/mistered.asp

http://www.snopes.com/lost/false.htm

[Easy 6]

Originally Posted by The Dude Abides

That entire picture is faked. Look at the antlers in contrast to the sky and trees.

Hey!!! a Dude Abides sighting, thats like glimpsing a snow leopard...

[listopencil]

Originally Posted by Baby Lee

http://www.snopes.com/lost/false.htm

No kidding, what in the world tipped you off? Was it this part:

"Likewise, Johnny Cash's famous televised live concert performance at California's Folsom Prison in January 1968 proved disastrous when several inmates wearing the traditional black and white prisoner's garb slipped unnoticed past guards, who had been provided only black and white monitors with which to view the proceedings."


I mean there is no way any one would have actually been watching hardcore prisoners with their own eyes, right?