Martha's Vineyard Regional High School (for real)

On most public lands units the MO for staff is to let nature take its course. If people stepped in every time an animal was injured, there would be a ton of sick, injured animals living unnaturally long lives, there would be less prey for predators, and you’d be preventing the natural course of the ecosystem.

It’s additionally cruel to artificially prolong the life of a wild animal in pain. Prosthetics need to be removed, cleaned, repaired. Medical intervention often requires followups. For ungulates injured limbs often cause life long pain and long slow recoveries, which is why even much loved horses often need to be put down due to broken limbs because their quality of life during and after healing is often MUCH reduced.

Feeding wild animals often causes dependency, and results in animals who don’t know how to forage for their own food. It also makes them more susceptible to disease (which is why a lot of winter ungulate feeding is getting shut down right now with CWD all over the place).

In the end, intervening for this moose would deny money to programs that help at an ecosystem/landscape level, probably not extend the animal’s life all that much, and deny a meal to predators and scavengers.

People are absurd, I would love to see them try to carry out literally any of their suggestions.