Anchorage Daily News

On one thing, everyone involved with a Thursday moose-snatching in Anchorage agrees: Two orphan calves now housed at the Alaska Zoo are very cute and oh-so-cuddly.

From there, views diverge on why the calves ended up in the back of a pickup, how they came to be the subject of a police stop on the Glenn Highway, and what should be done with them now.

Officially, a woman yet to be identified is being investigated for illegally transporting the calves and, possibly, capturing them. Unofficially, members of the Alaska Moose Federation say she was trying to save the calves before biologists with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game could snatch the orphaned animals from the wild and kill them. The moose federation is a private advocacy group lobbying to grow more moose in Alaska.

"To the best of my knowledge, and this is the truth, they were being taken to a secret, calf-rescue area," the federation's Tom Harris said Friday.

The calves, he added, are "not a moose federation issue," but then he criticized Fish and Game for "picking up the phone" and summoning three Anchorage squad cars to chase down "this poor woman" who was only trying to save the animals from the executioner.

Fish and Game was called to the scene to pick up the moose.

Gino del Frate, regional management coordinator for the state Division of Wildlife Conservation, however, said there was no execution planned. After the mother of the two calves was shot this week by an Anchorage homeowner defending his already stomped dog and his about-to-be-stomped wife, Fish and Game's Bruce Bartley did give Alaska Wildlife Troopers the authority to kill the calves if they saw them.

Fish and Game, del Frate said, considers it more humane to kill the calves than let them starve to death or get eaten alive by bears. And there are no zoos wanting moose calves.

But troopers never saw the calves, and as soon as word of the kill order got out the department began hearing from homeowners who knew of the cow being killed and wanted the calves saved. By Thursday, he said, the agency was rethinking its position.

"The pot was simmering,'' he said. "There were lots of phone calls being made in all sorts of directions."

Gov. Sarah Palin was among those stirring the pot, and by late Thursday she had issued a Twitter communique: "Announced the "stay of execution", orphaned moose calves to be protected @ this time by Dept of Fish & Game. Long-term solution still needed"

"We got the message," del Frate said.

Meanwhile, the moose federation, which has several times been denied authority to raise moose calves because it has no facility at which to raise them, was ramping up a public relations campaign. Federation spokesman Gary Olson, who did not return repeated phone calls, was getting ready to appear on Anchorage talk radio, and Harris was by Friday voicing claims in an interview that the state kills 200 moose calves a year and that Anchorage area biologist Rick Sinnott has a "secret calf disposal site."

"Your paper published the story,'' he said. "Why does (Sinnott) need a secret calf disposal site?"

The story the Daily News published referred to a moose calf Sinnott picked up a year ago after it was killed by a dog. Sinnott said the carcass would go to a secret site where predators and scavengers could eat it as usually happens in nature.

On Friday, del Frate adamantly denied the claim the state kills 200 moose, and Sinnott said he has a pretty good idea how many healthy calves have been killed in Anchorage in the last 16 years -- one.

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