A mysterious video of an apparent white Alaskan moose has captured the heart of the internet. As of Tuesday afternoon, the video, first posted to the Facebook page I Love Alaska, had accumulated more than 1.2 million views.
But while the sight of a totally white moose is rare, with more than 1 million moose across North America the condition is not unknown.
“Albino and/or leucistic moose occasionally turn up in Alaska, and there have been several sightings over the years in Interior Alaska, particularly,” said Ken Marsh, a spokesman with the Alaska Department of Fish & Game. With between 175,000 and 200,000 moose, Alaska is home to roughly one sixth of the continent’s moose population.
Albinism, a congenital disorder in which pigmentation is absent from much of the body, has been observed in almost all branches of the animal kingdom — including even-toed ungulates such as deer and moose.
Between 2009 and 2013, for instance, guests at the Alaska Garden Bed and Breakfast on the outskirts of Fairbanks have regularly spotted a white cow moose with a regular brown calf in tow.
Across Canada, meanwhile, albino moose have been spotted in virtually every region that is home to the regular brown kind of moose.
In 1939, an albino moose was glimpsed by King George VI and his wife, who were passing through Banff on a pre-Second World War Canadian tour. “Their Majesties also saw a beaver, a Rocky Mountain goat and scores of elk,” read a press account from the time.
Four years ago, Albertan Mauice Chenard spotted a “pinto” moose outside Falher, Alta. The animal had black and white spots similar to a Holstein cow.
Just across the border from Alaska, the Yukon’s MacBride Museum features a taxidermied albino moose shot in 1968 by the legendary Yukon trapper and outfitter Alex Van Bibber. “The albino was palomino color, with pink eyes, lips and pink hoofs,” declared the Whitehorse Star at the time.
Remarkably, there is no evidence of discrimination against the rare albino ungulate, this is an admirable moose quality and one that obviates the need for any legislative intervention
Yukon albino moose even got a tongue-in-cheek reference in a 2004 memoir by former Yukon premier Tony Penikett.
“Remarkably, there is no evidence of discrimination against the rare albino ungulate, this is an admirable moose quality and one that obviates the need for any legislative intervention,” he wrote.
Some populations of white Canadian moose may not even be albino. White “spirit” moose that have been observed for decades near Foleyet, Ont., for instance, are believed to be part of an anomalous subspecies of moose.
The Foleyet animals are essentially in the same category as B.C.’s iconic spirit bear, a subspecies of white-coated black bears that are also not albino. Previously moose studies have referred to this phenomenon as a “white morph.”
Foleyet’s white moose are protected from hunting by Ontario law. Similarly, around the world the once-vaunted prize of shooting a white moose has become extremely taboo.
In Nova Scotia in 2013, visiting hunters shot and killed a white moose on Cape Breton Island — outraging local Mi’kmaq groups who had spared the ungulate’s life due to its uniqueness as a “spirit animal.”
The apologetic hunters ultimately turned over the white hide to Nova Scotia’s Millbrook First Nation, where the deceased animal was honoured in a four-day ceremony.
Two years before, a very similar saga had played out on the other side of the Atlantic. Albin, a white moose that lived on the outskirts of Oslo, Norway, had been protected for at least four years by a gentlemen’s agreement among local hunters.
That is, until in 2011 when the moose was killed by a visiting Dane. “I decided to shoot the moose and it’s a decision I stand by,” he told Norwegian media.
Scandinavia, incidentally, is also home to one of the world’s leading photographers of white moose is Norway’s Lasse Dybdahl. A 2016 YouTube video by Dybdahl contains some of the most intimate footage yet captured of a white moose.
The animal lives somewhere in Sweden near the Norwegian border, although Dybdahl has declined to state exactly where.
“I don’t want to reveal the exact location. I want the moose to live in peace,” he said in an interview.
Interestingly, the eyes of Dybdahl’s moose are not pink, leading to speculation that its coat is also white due to a Foleyet-style gene, rather than albinism.
So far, at least, no Danes have shot it.
• Email: thopper@nationalpost.com | Twitter: TristinHopper
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