A woman walking her dog on a snowy sidewalk in Alaska was kicked in the head by a moose charging down the same sidewalk, and it was captured in video from a passing vehicle whose occupants were too late in warning her.
Tracy Hansen and her dog Gunner were walking the sidewalk of Old Seward Highway in Anchorage last Thursday when the moose charged from behind and essentially ran her over.
“I thought someone had not been paying attention and hit me with a bike or something,” Hansen told KTUU. “I had put my hands up to my head, and I’m like, ‘I’m bleeding.’”
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When she sat up and saw the moose ahead of her, Hansen realized it was the moose who ran her over.
Kate Timmons and her family saw it coming as they drove down the street alongside the sidewalk, with Timmons filming the encounter.
“Hey, hey, hey—watch out,” Timmons can be heard yelling out the window moments before contact, and then again as the moose struck Hansen.
Seconds after the encounter, the driver of the vehicle honked the horn, apparently to keep the moose moving along.
But the sequence of events did not sit well with many commenters on the NBC News YouTube channel, which showed the video. A sample of the critical comments:
“Let me grab my camera and video this before warning the woman in enough time to get out of the way. When the moose is done, I’ll honk to scare it as any good citizen would do.”
“The horn honk should have happened a solid 10-15 seconds earlier.”
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“I would have been LAYING on the horn!”
“Nice of them to inform the people who will be watching this clip AFTER the events, as oppose to immediately warning the person in danger of the approaching threat.”
“Climb on the roof screaming and waving arms while driver blasts the car horn but nooo, make sure you get video footage while that poor lady takes a hoof to her head!!! No End To Gotta-Get-My-Likes Fools.”
“Yeah, just film it don’t try to help her or anything, don’t speed up and try to get her in the car, just film it and yell at the moose like it understands.”
“The lady videoing should have alerted the lady much sooner to get out of the way.”
Nevertheless, Hansen was extremely grateful to the Timmons family for being there to help her after the collision.
“My husband was able to pull her over the snow bank, so we could get her in the truck with her dog and kind of get her out of the way,” Timmons told KTUU. “It definitely seemed unprovoked from our standpoint and it happened so fast it was just like, a matter of getting her out of the situation, getting her help, making sure…you know my big thing was that she didn’t have a head trauma, that there wasn’t a bleed or something.”
Hansen did need staples in her head, and was still recovering Monday from headaches and bruising throughout her body, but that didn’t stop her from walking her dog down the same path.
“We’ll be back on our normal walks,” Hansen told KTUU. “The moose won’t stop that.”
Photo courtesy of Kate Timmons.
