The moose cavalry threat

Another excerpt from The Speed of Nearly Everything.

Because horses are herd animals, seen as food by larger predators, they get nervous easily. A wild stallion may move forward to threaten a human, but picking up a stick is enough to make the horse think again, and choose retreat.

Clearly, horses are fairly easily ‘spooked’, and people who know horses are well aware of this. They will also assure anybody who will listen that the smell of a strange animal will always upset horses. Camels and Hannibal’s elephants have both been cited in the past as species that can cause cavalry horses to stampede.

I once stood in open woodland in Finland, as a reindeer farmer banged loudly on a tree, three times. The reindeer who knew that this was the food signal, came racing in. That was terrifying, and moose are bigger.

The moose has been used in a number of northern European cultures as a draught animal, pulling a sleigh, and even carrying riders on occasion. There are also tales of moose cavalry at various times, though these are hard to test out.

Blame Monty Python, who made the moose a running joke, for some of the confusion. There is at least one excellently manipulated digital image of a harnessed moose, supposedly used to haul logs out of forests. The giveaway is that one pile of logs appears on each side, one of the elements reversed, but if there has been one legpull, there may have been others.

You can read that Ivan the Terrible banned moose husbandry in Siberia in the 1500s to stop the locals using moose cavalry against him. You can also learn that in the 1700s, Sweden tried moose cavalry, because they believed the moose smell would terrify enemy horses, but the idea failed when it proved too hard to gather food for the animals, which seems improbable, given that they eat twigs.

They may or may not have existed, but if they ever did, the moose cavalry would have charged at 55 km/hr or 35 mph — and provided the Python team with some excellent material.