For the last year, David Lawrence has cared for a young moose named Pete that he nursed back to health after it was attacked by dogs and separated from its mother.

Now, Pete eats leaves out of Lawrence’s hands and allows the 73-year-old farmer with the chest-length white beard to scratch his neck like a horse or an oversized dog. Sometimes Pete chases after Lawrence in his pickup truck as he leaves the fenced-in elk hunting preserve where the moose now lives in Irasburg, near the Canadian border.

“I feel that he and I have a bond that I think is unique and I think he’s a bit confused as to just who he is,” Lawrence said of the 600-pound animal. “I’m not sure he thinks he’s a moose. I think he thinks I’m his father or something, maybe his mother.”

But the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife says Pete and other native deer and moose living in the compound shouldn’t be mixing with the farm-raised elk. Officials say animal feed could introduce chronic wasting disease, a brain ailment that strikes deer-like animals, into Vermont.

It could become necessary to destroy Pete and the others. In any event, they can’t be released into the wild, officials said.

The state’s top game warden, Col. David LeCours, said Friday the department would be open to finding a way to save the animals, including Pete, but the bigger issue is the health of Vermont’s entire populations of deer and moose.

“The concern we would have as a department on a much broader scale … is that this disease gets spread into the wild population,” LeCours said. “We as a department have to err on the side of caution.”

Lawrence would like to let Pete live out his days within the 700-acre enclosed elk hunting preserve because he’s too tame to release into the forests of Vermont, but he’d settle for sending him to an appropriate game preserve.

Associated Press