To Pat White

This is from the John Polacsek collection. I do not have a date or show but the guy and the background tell us it is on a field show of some sort. Perhaps this is the Christy Bros. circus. George Christy had some unusual led stock including wapiti (or elk) with nice antlers. The back side of the photo has these words "Jacob Kuhn trainer of Novia Scosia, Ibex.(sic)" I guess that means the animals were from Nova Scotia or perhaps one was named Nova and the other Scotia. Moose do indeed occur in Nova Scotia though thier numbers there are threatened. Of course "Ibex" is wrong. These are moose - -no doubt about it. The Ibex is a wild goat and several species range across mountainous areas of Europe, North Africa, and into Asia. I will have to depend on others to tell me who Jacob Kuhn was. In the monumental Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia, Mammals, Vol. IV, Lutz Heck and Herbert Wendt wrote about moose. They pointed out that in the Baltics, Sweden and Russia, moose have been shown to be quite tamable. [They occur there as well as in northern North America.] The writers gave much detail. It seems a certain Dr. Peter Krott residing in Finland, broke two young moose, Pussi and Magnus. When almost full grown they were broken to harness and pulled a sleigh. He took them all around Finland in a truck. They followed Krott around like domestic dogs. The Russians had moose training stations as far back as 1938 and seemingly continued with such experiments into the 1960s. Moose were trained as riding animals, to tote loads on their backs and to pull sleighs loaded with logs. The writers described them as very tractable even when they were of huge size. One huge male at a moose farm killed a bear without using his antlers - just by smashing the bear's skull with blows from his front legs. After all a male moose can stand 7 ft. at the shoulder and weigh upwards of 1,800 pounds - -by far the largest of the world's deer species. . Richard