Animal Crime: Drunken Elk Terror

Elk and cattle will get drunk if they eat apples that are a little over-ripened. And what do drunken elk do? They attack Swedish schoolkids and the elderly!

From Reuters here:

A drunken elk is terrorising children at a school in southern Sweden.

“That could be the problem. We could be dealing with a boozy elk,” Jan Caiman, a police officer in Molndal, told the national news agency TT. The elk was probably eating fermented apples in a garden and had become inebriated, Caiman said.

Elk can weigh as much as 500 kilos (1,100 lb) and personnel at the school described the erratic male as “completely mad”.

Caiman said police had contacted hunters and that if the elk did not calm down, it could be shot.

And from the Guardian here:

A drunken party of elks surrounded an old people’s home in Sweden and had to be driven away by armed police, Sweden’s media reported yesterday.

The elks attacked the home in the town of stra G inge, near Malm , after devouring large numbers of fermented apples, the paper Dagens Nyheter said. Police with dogs had failed to scare them off, and the animals only ran away after hunters with guns arrived on the scene.

Don’t they have hunters in Sweden? This sounds like a scene from Over the Hedge. I could hear the elk now yelling at the Old Folk’s Home, “C’mon out ya sissies! Hic! I can take on the lot o’ yous! Hic! With one fuzzy antler tied behind my rump!”