In what they describe as one of their more unique calls of the last few months, the Estevan Fire Department tried their hand at animal control over the weekend. A moose wandered into an Estevan back yard on Sunday afternoon, possibly trying to find a place to watch the Super Bowl, and it took the fire department, police, and conservation officers to finally get the animal back into the wild. 

"It sounded as if conservation officers were unable to shoo the moose out of the yard and into the outer city limits," said Fire Chief Dale Feser. "They actually had to call in an individual and wait for serum to tranquilize the animal. Once the animal was tranquilized, the fire department assisted with loading up the moose and transporting it outside the city limits."

Since an adult male moose can weigh as much as 700 kilograms, it wasn't just a matter of throwing the animal in the back of a truck. Feser said they've got a wide range of equipment for this purpose, but ultimately it was the simplest piece of equipment that proved the most valuable. 

"We can zip in with a UTV and if the animal is very large we can hook up a winch system there and draw it on to a tilt deck trailer," Feser said. "We were fortunate in this particular case that the animal was small enough that they just used a tarp. A tarp sliding on the snow can actually be a crazy carpet. There was enough manpower on scene to physically pull the animal on the tarp onto the trailer and secure it down."

Fire fighters then took the animal outside of town and waited for it to wake up and shake off the effects of the tranquilizer. It went off into the wild and hopefully won't make any more forays into back yards. According to Feser, as crazy as the call may seem at first, it's also something he's seeing more often in recent years.

"In the last five years the rate of occurrences has actually climbed a little bit," he said. "There were quite a few times we were on standby, however the conservation officers were able to shoo the moose under its own power outside the city limits. But you take a look at some of the agencies we work with all the time, conservation officers are another group of individuals we have to be able to work with because we just don't know what type of calls we're going to get."

No word on whether the moose bet the over on the score in Super Bowl LIV.