Young moose crashes through the front door of a B.C. school board office

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This article was published 12/09/2019 (2193 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

FORT ST. JOHN, B.C. – A moose that may have had a yearning for learning smashed its way into the Peace River North School District office in Fort St. John, B.C.

Jarrod Bell, a director of instruction in the district, says it was just before closing on Wednesday when he heard what sounded like an entire band of cymbal players falling down the stairs.

Instead, he came out of his office to see a young moose in the building’s foyer that had crashed through the glass front door.

He says several employees called police and the Conservation Officer Service, and both services needed some convincing that they actually had a moose intruder in the office.

Bell says the district’s superintendent walked around the outside building to open a back door and the moose “made a dash for it.”

He says a conservation officer later told them that this is the time of year when moose mothers tell their teenage offspring that it’s time to go earn their own living.

“It may be the case that the moose was upset that it was alone,” he says.

The moose had some minor cuts and Bell says while staff didn’t see where it went at the time, they were able to track its movements afterwards.

“So, there were drops of blood through the hallway in learning services into an open office,” he says. “It wandered up to one of the windows because you could see the blood and saliva on the desk where it had obviously gone up and looked through a window.”

A conservation officer came back to the office to say they’d tracked the moose to the back yard of a nearby home, Bell says.

“While we were saying goodbye to the (conservation officer) the moose came running from the north down through towards the south and just kept going,” he laughed.

Bell says he has since heard the officer spent much of the evening tracking the animal out of town.