A Saskatchewan man is lucky to be alive after fighting off a bull moose with his bare hands, a shovel, and a .22 rifle.
On January 22, Shawn Tuffnell heard his mother, Angie, screaming outside their home in Bienfait. He ran out and came face-to-face with a full-grown bull moose standing over her, according to a Facebook post he shared after the incident.
Tuffnell says he yelled at the animal, which pinned its ears and turned on him. So he did what any calm, rational, self-respecting Canadian would do.
He punched it in the mouth.
The bull swung back with its head and nearly caught him in the face. Realizing he wouldn’t be any use to his mother if the moose got the best of him, Tuffnell grabbed a shovel and started swinging. Then the bull charged him. At one point, both man and moose tripped and went down.
The moose reportedly pushed halfway into the house, trying to get at Tuffnell, but the bull kept trying to turn back toward Angie, who was down on frozen concrete.
“He kept trying to turn back towards mom, so I grabbed it by the ear, then had my left arm around its neck and started punching,” Tuffnell said in his Facebook post.
Tuffnell continued to tussle with the bull, grabbing the massive animal by the nostrils like a nose ring, and trying to steer it away from his mother.
Tuffnell said he was just trying to keep the animal occupied so it wouldn’t go back after his mother. He yelled at her to stay still and not say anything, so the animal wouldn’t try to get back at her and stomp her, all while yelling for his mother’s boyfriend, Dave Alexander, to get a gun.
“[The bull] turned and came at me again with his mouth wide open, trying to bite me,” Tuffnell said. “I grabbed him around the neck again to keep him close so he couldn’t use his feet to get me.”
In the middle of all that chaos, Alexander was finally able to hand Tuffnell a .22 rifle.
Which is ballistically superior to a shovel. But just barely.
Tuffnell says he aimed for the eyes first, trying to blind the moose so it couldn’t locate his mother. He emptied the first magazine, reloaded, and kept firing through the eye socket in an effort to reach the brain. It reportedly took multiple reloads and more than two dozen rounds before the bull finally dropped. Tuffnell then added another string of shots to make sure it was done.
All told, he walked away with a broken rib and a bruised head. His mother sustained a nasty leg gash that required stitches.
This is far from an endorsement of the .22 as a moose rifle. If anything, it’s a real-time demonstration of just how tough big animals are, even at contact distance.
The Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative examined the bull’s carcass and determined the cause of death was “multiple gunshot wounds to the head,” including one that entered the brain, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
The report also stated that the bull did not test positive for rabies or chronic wasting disease. But it also had no remaining fat stores. In other words, it was starving to death.
