“Did he lose it? Did he lose it? Right now?” Here is a video of a moose losing an antler. He shook his head, and off it came. (Do not watch it with the sound on. The jaunty music will fool you.)
“He then looked a little scared and stunned and was shaking his head and made a really mournful sound afterwards.” What have you lost lately that you were not expecting to lose? Shake your head. Does it help? Do you feel better? Did you make a mournful little sound? And was it any less lost for all that?
[Image via]
I did a drawing of my SIL’s dog and after hours of working on it, decided it was terrible, tore it into 4 perfect squares and threw it out. I wasn’t expecting to lose it, but lose it I did and frankly, I feel good about it (but I did let out a mournful sigh when I chucked it in the recycling box because I should have lost it sooner and saved the time for starting over).
What have you lost lately that you were not expecting to lose?
Wow, this could go in a depressingly existential direction. I never expected to lose my health to the point where it would jeopardize my ability to do my job. That’s a good lead-in for telling my beloved Toasties that I applied for extended FMLA. I’ll be working part-time at my job starting March 21 and continuing through the rest of our spring semester (May 13).
I’m sorry.
Thanks, bb. I’m trying to stay positive, but it’s tough. Yoikes and away!
I’m sorry to hear that. I hope the time off helps you heal.
Thanks, hon! I know I’m crap at letting myself heal. That’s going to be the toughest part.
O man, that smells. I hope that you have the support that you need ♥
Yes, thank you! The Burgomaster is being very supportive, and I have a good (if small) network of local friends.
I hope the change in schedule gives you time to recover and heal as much as possible. Wishes for the best of self-care to you.
Glad you have the protections of FMLA (though it’s not perfect) and sad that you need to use it.
I hope you’ll still be Toast-ing with ever-apt gifs.
And resting and healing.
I’ll be around! Maybe not quite as frequent in the comments, but we’ll see! I honestly have no idea what my life is going to look like working part time. Right now I can’t imagine it.
Man, that sucks and I am sorry.
Aw, may your time off bring you lowered stress levels and lots of healing.
don’t worry about the moose! moose, and deer and all of their ilk, shed their antlers for winter every year. It’s perfectly natural and they will grow back.
I came to the comments because I knew someone would reassure me this is normal and okay. Thank you.
Yep, nothing to fear. After the attracting lady-ungulates/fighting for the hearts of said lady-ungulates season is over, males shed their antlers and grow a whole new set, starting in the late spring. It takes a lot of calories to produce and maintain antlers, and they just can’t afford to keep the antlers around during the winter when food might be hard to find.
(Though as winters in most of these climates get warmer, we might see animals shedding antlers less. It should create negative selective pressure, to keep your antlers if you’re a deer or a moose… it should make it less likely that you’ll survive long enough to pass on a lot of your genes. But if it becomes easier to find plentiful food in the winter, the guys who happen to NOT shed might survive just fine.)
So anyway, the moose is okay, but I think it’s a little touching and, uh, humanizing? (bad choice of word?) that he seems startled and even dismayed by his antler dropping off.
I think no matter what you are it is probably always dismaying to have a big part of your face suddenly fall off
I am so glad you said that, I was all worried about how he would defend himself from now on!
(Obviously I need to brush up on my Moose Facts)
Switchblades and dance offs?
Enormous girth, pointy feets, and just the most belligerent temper you can possibly imagine.
Making friends with local cats
I would still be real sad after I lost the thing I spent a year growing. I almost feel this way about my baby.
How do they sleep? How would you lay down with something sticking out from your head? But how would you keep standing all night with all that weight on your head? I have a mental picture of one of those massage-table face pillow thingies.
The article goes on to say this!
“But the moose more likely experienced a sense of relief, says moose biologist and author Bill Samuel of the University of Alberta. Moose and other deer relatives shed their antlers every year, and the process is thought to be painless, says Samuel.
“Usually both antlers are shed within hours or days of one another,” author Art Rodgers writes in the book Moose. “Bulls will occasionally try to speed up completion of the process by knocking the old antlers against trees to shed them.”
House Hunters International.
I HAD NO IDEA THAT MOOSE ARE A SPECIES OF DEER?!
I thought they were two entirely different but related animals?!
A moose is the same as a European elk, but an American elk is a wapiti, which I always get confused with caribou, though actually caribou are reindeer. I hope this clarifies things for you. (NB: Although it’s an easy mistake to make, a moose should not be confused with 57 pudus wearing a trenchcoat.)
But what kind of deer is a deer?!
I feel so stupid! I’ll just look it up now.
probably you’re thinking of the white-tailed deer, it is most common in North America.
Or a red deer, which are the big deer-looking not moose or caribou deer in Europe
Let’s close the circle! My father, a Finn, once referred to the reindeer (singular) running through his back yard as an elk.
I didn’t know either! Such an unexpectedly educational link.
Thank you; I feel marginally less stupid knowing I am not alone!
On the one hand, I’d love to have a magnificent set of antlers growing out of my head.
On the other hand, I’d be sad when they’d get shed.
On the third hand, at least when they’re shed there wouldn’t be dipwads out trying to shoot me so they can display my magnificent antlers over their fireplace.
On the fourth hand, should I be worried about all these extra hands?
Wish I could grow deciduous weapons out of my head.
“deciduous weapons”
That phrase is so very perfect, you should feel very proud of your linguistic skills.
Are the extra hands coming out of your head?
Would you want to carry around 40lbs (nearly 18.5 kilos) on your head if it served no purpose? It’s like fingernails. No pain. Probably surprise.
And “One down, one to go!”
I lost a friend recently (as in the friendship terminated, not that the friend died), which I did not expect, but there are signs that maybe the friendship will grow back, just like the moose’s antlers will. It’s all part of the cycles of life, I suppose.
O, I “lost” a “friend” recently, too. If by lost you mean she unfriended me on Facebook because i did not agree that Duran Duran were the best the 80s had to offer and by friend you mean work colleague.
This is the worst commiseration ever, and i hope that you and your friend work things out, or at least work out a healthy solution.
“Duran Duran were the best the 80s had to offer” ummm…
i’ve had at least two friendships break off and then grow back. there is a faint, small hope.
I too have seen the regrowth of two friendships that I thought were decidedly over. Take heart, friends!
A friend who is also my cousin who I have known all my life. After I slammed the phone down, thought about it for a few weeks, got back in touch with her We have agreed not to ever discuss politics again.
Those kinds of things get worse when you substitute “mother” for “friend…”
Moose are fundamentally goofy looking, so I feel sorry for the one antlered one here. No dignity left at all.
It is hard for me to think of moose as “goofy” since in my part of the world they are the most dangerous thing that you might hit on the road. They habitually wander out onto the highway, and are so tall that a car will take out their legs, and then they tall on top of the windshield/top of the car and crush the driver/passenger. __If you hit a deer you’ll be fine. The deer will not but you can take it home and eat it. (My dad hit a deer driving me home from girl guides once and did this. It may have been one of the string of experiences that led to my going vegetarian at 14.)
It all depends on how you hit the deer! Some are perfectly OK to eat after a collision. Others are not as okay.
short version: if the car hit the deer’s rump or head, go for it, but if there is any chance that a digestive system rupture has occurred, LEAVE IT ALONE
I feel like we hit that deer side-on and Dad still fed it to us. Then again a) my dad would totally do something like that without looking into the consequences (how could he even try to look into consequences, this was before the internet) or b) It could be that I never actually got out of the car until we got home and I’m only imagining seeing the deer spread across the grill because I was pretty horrified at the whole thing.
You just caused me to have a serious space out thinking OH MY GOD how did people find out how to safely eat roadkill before the Internet.
We live in a magical time
Yup, my Grampa was a Greyhound bus driver, and one time he encountered a moose in the middle of the road – he didn’t hit it, but they got to have a stareoff because while my Grampa was sitting high up in the bus driver’s seat of a big coach bus, the moose was so gigantic that they were at eye level with each other. Terrifying.
It’s like your Grampa had a supporting role in an Elizabeth Bishop poem!
There’s even a song about moose on the road! Like so many folk songs, it delivers a useful warning
I was hoping it would be this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTSPFWZxAao I’m glad there’s no shortage of road-moose songs though!
I was just thinking how uncomfortable it must be to have only one. Antlers are HEAVY. Hopefully the second one sheds quickly… or there are secret moose chiropractors deep in the woods.
moose are goofy looking but they get rapidly less funny the closer you are to them
they are IMMENSE
I also imagine they are not very fresh-smelling.
The first time I ever saw a moose in the flesh I was out hiking alone. The moose was on the trail ahead of me, and because I’m weird my thought process was:
1. holy shit, that’s big!
2. how can those spindly little legs possible hold that thing up?
3. that’s…a lot of pee
4. maybe I should get the hell out of here before this things notices me
It must be a very strange feeling, to suddenly have much much less weight on your head. And your neck must take a while to adjust. I bet the muscles even change.
Sometimes when you lose something, even when it’s natural and healthy, just the shock of the adjustment can be a lot to deal with.
And also moose are delicious, I don’t know if that makes me an equal opportunity moose lover or not.
I just deleted my comment accidentally on how much I adore moose and now I look like a weirdo. Let’s recap that I love them and my Toast bio used to reference that I’ve been to every province and never seen one even in a ZOO.
And also that hitting a moose in your car will probably kill you, so moose are great until they want to hang out on the highway with you.
Oh hello, I see we have similarities.
I love moose, too! Both as living animals and as food. They are delicious, and also fascinating, badass creatures. I grew up in the Rocky Mountains, so I saw moose aplenty back in the day.
So I probably shouldn’t brag here that I went hiking in Cape Breton *once* and saw three, including a mama and baby moose?
You may, but only because I can counter that I went whale watching in Cape Breton on some dude’s lobster boat and saw an entire pod of whales plus a seal plus a ton of cool birds.
So late to the party but my brother got hit by a moose when he was in high school and he survived with only a few bruises. It sideswiped his truck on the driver’s side but there was surprisingly little damage.
Also once I saw a living moose and a dead moose within five minutes of each other. That was an odd morning. (This is all in New Hampshire, by the way.)
i lost an entire packet of stickies in my cubicle a week ago. They have still not reappeared.
I firmly maintain that moose are mythical creatures. Maine and Vermont have promised me sightings of them, with dire warnings about road accidents, but I have never actually seen one. They are the jackalope of the Northeast.
I once spent a month in Texas and not once saw a live armadillo. This disappoints me greatly.
Armadillos are better in theory than practice, you didn’t miss out on much. They also jump when scared and have been known to cause car accidents.
The armadillos that I have seen are:
1) ADORABLE
2) a LOT smaller than I thought they would be. Not being from Texas, in my wild New England youth, I thought they would be roughly the size of an anteater. Now that I live here, I have seen several, but the ones I have seen are like….the size of a large housecat, maybe?
3) ADORABLE (their leeeetle snouts are sooooo cute!)
Yes!! Have you heard of pink fairy armadillos? They are preposterous and ALSO ADORABLE.
I invite you to grow up in rural Northern Ontario. (Or just go camping in Algonquin, the Moose there are so used to people they don’t frighten away from you unless you come quite close.)
I guarantee, I show up there, all supposed moose will immediately vanish. I am a moose-negating zone.
This is how I feel about hummingbirds and foxes! Never seen either in real life, so they must not exist!
Oh, this is where I get to tell my fox story! So where I live they not too long ago finished building a new bridge for the interstate over the river, and part of the deal is that they have to restore the meadows they destroyed. So step one to this type of restoration is to cover the ground where all the invasive species have taken over during the three or four years it took to build the bridge, and leave the covering (heavy-duty black plastic) there until the invasive plants all die from lack of sunlight. So, this is all happening along the bike path I use to get to campus every day, and one day I’m riding in and I see what I initially think are dogs playing on this huge tarp. It had been raining, and these animals were using the tarp like a slip-n-slide. As I got closer I realized no dog in the world had a tail like that, and then I ended up stopping to watch these three foxes play in the rain for like half an hour. It was wonderful!
*cat with hearts for eyes* You live in a magical place!! My heart hurts just thinking about how lovely that scene would be.
I’ve lived in the Prairies for thirty-mumble years and not once have I seen deer crossing at Deer Crossing signs. Miffed.
Be grateful. Generally if you see them it is because you are running into them.
“In the video, shot by Eberhart’s uncle, a woman can be heard saying: ‘He’s in pain, he’s crying. Poor guy.’
But the moose more likely experienced a sense of relief, says moose biologist and author Bill Samuel of the University of Alberta. Moose and other deer relatives shed their antlers every year, and the process is thought to be painless, says Samuel.”
This was very, very comforting to me.
Also, I liked the part in the video that said squirrels, birds, and other small animals eat the fallen antlers! Because a, it’s nice to think of certain lost things in terms of them moving on to nourish or help others, and b, BONE-EATING SQUIRRELS, GUYS
I’m surprised the squirrels wait for the antlers to be shed, tbh.
I always thought the shedding process was supposed to be mostly itchy or just vaguely annoying like when your teeth fall out as a kid.
I know all the sounds losing things make.
Someone out in the world who has the same name as me apparently frequently forgets his e-mail address, or lots of people he knows assume what it is and I get a wide range of amusing e-mails meant for him (don’t forget to dress up for Zombie Skate at the skating rink! Do you want to play professional basketball in London?), but my favorite, which I still have saved in my inbox, was from a person named Scott. The subject line was “today’s moose” and attached were five distant pictures of a moose just chilling in the woods. No text in the body of the e-mail, just pictures of a moose. It might be my favorite e-mail I’ve ever received.
Now, thinking about it, knowing that there is another angrypedestrian out there who is receiving daily pictures of a moose, and not me, is a great personal loss.
This is fantastic.
Excellent. I have a friend who received wedding photos from someone who I think confused a .net with a .com type of address. This was back in the livejournal days, and he posted the photos and we had a whale of a time looking through the photos and speculating on what everyone’s story was.
I lost my timer at work today. I was in the middle of timing something, but I never found it. It’s just gonna beep sadly for a while but it will never fulfill its purpose.
This is amazingly bleak. Well done.
Somebody stole my wallet while I was out to lunch two days ago and I lost a) my driver’s license and all of my bank cards, and b) my sense of myself as a Hardboiled City Dweller Who is Aware of City Risks. I made noise that was more huffing, embarrassed/exasperated than the moose’s.
Wear clothes with pockets where you always put these important cards. A fashion statement if you will. I do. You will only lose the purse, a brush, and maybe a sandwich and some cheap sandals you planned to wear after you got to work in a thunderstorm.
Don’t be sad, moose. You have transformed into a majestic moosicorn and the worries of the world should not weigh down your innocent heart.
I watched Carol in the front right seat of the theater and my neck was contorted all day. I wonder if the moose is off balance or at least annoyed. [crying emoji]
P.S. The perspective was off but luckily I forgot about it. Until she held up a record in the sleeve and it was a fucking trapezoid
I lost my social security card. When we were starting the process of getting approved for a mortgage.
Thankfully the social security office was wildly efficient, and I received my new card exactly a week to the day of going into the office and applying for a replacement.
God, that blows. Glad it worked out, though!
Today it occurred to me that I haven’t cried in several weeks. I’ve teared up a bit but only in a happy/wistful way, no full-on miserable sobbing. It’s good, I guess, but it’s weird too? More of a change than a loss, I guess.
Also: someone had a crush on me and I did not feel the same way and it was awkward all around. Now they like someone else and it’s great but also I’m kind of… sad? I guess? Like, I still don’t have feelings for them but I guess I liked knowing they liked me? I don’t know. I hope it works out with their new crush, though.
A $900 dollar check, which has been resent 2x and keeps vanishing into thin air. Lost too to me, is the tracking number, which would have clarified where exactly it got lost, as despite sending it certified mail, my old work’s HR apparently thinks the point of certified mail is to put the sticker on, and then cheerful throw away the MATCHING TRACKING NUMBERS ON THE SLIP SHE IS SUPPOSED TO KEEP TO MAKE SURE IT GETS WHERE IT IS GOING AND WHICH IF SHE HAD SHE COULD GIVE TO ME SO I CAN FIND OUT WHERE THE DAMN POST OFFICE HAS HIDDEN MY CHECK.
Enjoying this image of an HR admin, who in my version resembles one of the dueling fairies in Sleeping Beauty, *cheerfully* discarding all important information.
Crying now.
A few days ago I lost a poem I’ve had memorized for many years, one of the good ones I always come back to. I hadn’t thought about it for a long while, and then I tried, and it was gone. This morning it came dripping back, unbidden, on my bike ride to work. It was like welcoming an old friend.
Wait! what?? ”Moose antlers are delicious meaning they are meant to fall off” ?????!!!!!! Wow that’s interesting!! So moose lose their antlers simply BECAUSE they are delicious food??? wow isn’t nature sooooo delightfully quirky..
Oh hang on…. it says ‘deciduous’ not ‘delicious’… meh.. well that certainly is boring.
I mean. Probably? Being slightly older than me, she was actually there.
But the whole thing started when she wanted me to compare a Larry Gowan vid to a Duran Duran vid, and i tried to nope the hell out of the conversation without hurting feelings and did not succeed at the latter. I understand from mutual friends that she still thinks i am the _worst_ for insulting her musical taste on Facebook. I have a hard time not laughing.
What have I lost lately that I was not expecting to lose?
Mild depression! 🙂
What have I lost lately that I was not expecting to lose?
Mild depression! 🙂
And "One down, one to go!"