It shouldn't happen even to a moose

In another stellar example of Alaska's ambitions toward a bureaucracy as screwed up as the rest of you have, Fish & Game put the stranded moose out of its misery today. It only took EIGHT DAYS of protracted animal suffering and anguished public outcry to finally rub a couple tiny little public-employee neurons together and - lightbulb! - put a bullet in the goddamn gun. They said after eight days, it "didn't look well." (Really?)

Now, I don't think that any of the proposed rescue scenarios would have truly worked. And I recognize that such incidents play out with no human intervention or knowledge, all over this great land, to species large and small in the myriad ways of nature. But when it plays out on the bluff across from a city of a quarter million people and you can see it and you can do something, then for god's sake, you DO something to end the thirst and the terror and the desperation. You don't suddenly pretend that Alaska has some high-minded policy of non-intervention, for a species that is "managed" to the level that can damn near predict the second when folks in McCarthy will be able to pick up their dinner forks...but we can't possibly spare a bullet to hasten the inevitable for this one that suffers for days before our eyes? I am so ashamed of this debacle I don't even know what to say.