"under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every moose you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. we have never seen a moose not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. we have never seen a totally sane moose"
from the fascinatingly depressing section on moose social organization from E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology, which I occasionally open for random animal facts
A young moose passes through two crises during the period of declining dependence on its mother. The first is in the spring, when it is one year old and its mother has just given birth to a new calf. The dam suddenly turns hostile and drives the yearling from her territory. The young moose lingers in the immediate vicinity and repeatedly attempts to return to the dam.
to be clear I'm aware many species do something like this, it's not just moose. but this hit me through the charismatic megafauna backdoor in the brain, and I became mildly distraught about a species where ¿severe attachment trauma? is a universal part of their life cycle. your mom who was previously fine and took care of you suddenly kicks you out of the house and fights you when you try to come back in through the door
when I infodumped to 81k about this he said "what if moose are really nice but we've never observed their true untraumatized personality"
I spent a lot of time looking up a pdf so I could read about the second crisis of the young moose and stumbled across this from the same publication:
Sexual pair bonding is strong in the tree shrew, and the male marks both the cage and his mate with scent. The male and female sleep together in a nest that is constructed mostly by the male.When the female becomes pregnant she builds a second nest, in which she later bears her young. The litter size is typically two. The mother soon leaves the helpless infants and returns to the first nest to rejoin the male. Thereafter, she visits the nursery only every 48 hours. The infants move Tree shrewfrom one of her six nipples to another in an unsystematic way. After a few minutes the mother shakes them off and runs away. The young are left to groom themselves and, presumably, to clean out their own feces. The adults do not retrieve them when they are left outside the nest, and the infants do not utter distress calls. Parents forced to remain too close to their young often kill and eat them. When they are about 33 days old, the young tree shrews start emerging from their nest for short foraging trips, and the rhythm of maternal visits begins gradually to break down. At first the young return to their own nest at night and whenever they are frightened, but after 3 days they shift to the parental nest. Sexual maturity is reached at about 90 days of age. Afterward the young evidently scatter to find mates and territories of their own.
