page_title: Moose
section_title: As food
hierarchical_section_title: Moose / Relationship with humans / As food
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Trophée de tête d'élan dans le château de Tanlay (Yonne, région Bourgogne, France) English: Elk head trophy in the Château de Tanlay, Yonne department, Burgundy, France.
context_page_description: The moose or elk, Alces alces, is a member of the New World deer subfamily and is the largest and heaviest extant species in the deer family. Most adult male moose have distinctive broad, palmate antlers; most other members of the deer family have antlers with a dendritic configuration. Moose typically inhabit boreal forests and temperate broadleaf and mixed forests of the Northern Hemisphere in temperate to subarctic climates. Hunting and other human activities have caused a reduction in the size of the moose's range over time. It has been reintroduced to some of its former habitats. Currently, most moose occur in Canada, Alaska, New England, Fennoscandia, the Baltic states, and Russia. Its diet consists of both terrestrial and aquatic vegetation. The most common moose predators are the gray wolf along with bears and humans. Unlike most other deer species, moose do not form herds and are solitary animals, aside from calves who remain with their mother until the cow begins estrus, at which point the cow chases away young bulls. Although generally slow-moving and sedentary, moose can become aggressive and move quickly if angered or startled.
context_section_description: Moose are hunted as a game species in many of the countries where they are found. Moose meat tastes, wrote Henry David Thoreau in "The Maine Woods", "like tender beef, with perhaps more flavour; sometimes like veal". While the flesh has protein levels similar to those of other comparable red meats (e.g. beef, deer and wapiti), it has a low fat content, and the fat that is present consists of a higher proportion of polyunsaturated fats than saturated fats.
  Dr. Valerius Geist, who emigrated to Canada from the Soviet Union, wrote in his 1999 book Moose: Behaviour, Ecology, Conservation:
  In Sweden, no fall menu is without a mouthwatering moose dish. The Swedes fence their highways to reduce moose fatalities and design moose-proof cars. Sweden is less than half as large as the Canadian province of British Columbia, but the annual take of moose in Sweden—upward of 150,000—is twice that of the total moose harvest in North America.
  Boosting moose populations in Alaska for hunting purposes is one of the reasons given for allowing aerial or airborne methods to remove wolves in designated areas, e.g., Craig Medred: "A kill of 124 wolves would thus translate to [the survival of] 1488 moose or 2976 caribou or some combination thereof". Some scientists believe that this artificial inflation of game populations is actually detrimental to both caribou and moose populations as well as the ecosystem as a whole. This is because studies have shown that when these game populations are artificially boosted, it leads to both habitat destruction and a crash in these populations.
caption: Moose trophy head
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