Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law

by Mary Roach

Taser International briefly sold a wildlife taser, the X3W, that some thought held promise as a hazing tool. The devices were purchased mainly to be used as they are on humans, to gain control in a threatening situation without necessitating the firing of a lethal weapon. The item sold poorly, a company representative told me, because it was costly and because it only worked on very tall mammals—a moose, or a bear on its hind legs—and at a distance of less than 25 feet. (Otherwise one of its two probes, the downwardly aimed one, would hit the ground.) The impetus for the X3W was an agitated moose whose calves were stuck in an open house foundation. The moose had chased Larry Lewis, of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, and a state trooper three times around the patrol car, when the trooper pulled out his Taser. The moose was stunned, recovered, and ran off, allowing Lewis to safely extract the calves. Impressed, he contacted the Taser people and worked with them to design a wildlife version that was safety-tested at the Kenai Moose Research Center (“a world leader in moose science”). Tasing was found to be less stressful to the animal than tranquilization, and safer in that there’s no risk of killing it by overdose. (Darts are filled according to an estimate of the animal’s weight.) So it seemed like a promising alternative when a situation develops quickly and lives are at stake, or when a moose has “a chicken feeder stuck on its head”—the example Lewis provided for ...