A woman in the Edmonton area who cared for a moose for over a week before it died of a leg injury in her property is frustrated with the lack of support from Alberta Fish & Wildlife and other societies.

An injured moose wandered into Lorri Jankowski-Arndt’s acreage south of Sherwood Park earlier this month, and she tried to help it as much as she could, but wasn’t knowledgeable enough to make an important decision.

“In 10 days this moose could have had internal injuries, but who am I to be making those calls,” Jankowski-Arndt told CTV News. “That’s what was so frustrating to me … 10 days seems like such an eternity when you see – when you feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know if I’m asking the right questions. I don’t know if I’m relaying the proper or correct information.”

Jankowski-Arndt said she received guidance over the phone from Fish & Wildlife, but no one would go to her property to look at the moose unless it was to put it down.

The moose spent the first week able to stand and walk around, but on the eighth day Jankowski-Arndt started to see the decline.

Fish & Wildlife told CTV News this is a common occurrence, and because of that, they tell callers to keep an eye on the animal and inform them if the situation changes. In this case, Fish & Wildlife chose to stand back because the moose was still walking around on its own.

“We commonly get calls on injured wildlife, including animals like deer, moose, and elk and so on, and a lot of the injuries are leg injuries,” Fish & Wildlife Officer Dennis Prodan said. “Generally speaking, if the animal is still up and walking, and it’s viable and it’s eating and doing everything it needs to do, we’re not going to go out there and put it down because it makes no sense to put down an animal that’s still doing okay and able to take care of itself. And with the first few calls we got on this moose, that was the case.

“At that point our message to the caller was just to keep an eye on it and see if it’s doing okay, it’s doing okay, and if it’s going to go downhill, then give us a call back and we’ll come out and assess it and see if it needs to be put down. But otherwise, if it’s viable we want to give it every benefit of the doubt,” Prodan said.

Jankowski-Arndt wishes that Fish & Wildlife had put the moose down sooner, but the organization claims that the death was sudden because for most of the 10 days, the animal was walking around on its own. If they had gone out to Jankowski-Arndt acreage near Sherwood Park, it would have been to kill the moose because there isn’t a place where they can take it.

“Some people would expect that we would come out there and every injured animal would get taken into some kind of wildlife rehabilitation centre and gets fixed up and sent back to live out in the wild again, which is not the reality,” Prodan said. “Especially with big animals like moose and so on, there’s no place you could take a moose or a deer to have its leg operated on and mended, and then brought back to full health and released. That just doesn’t happen anywhere in North America that I’m aware of.”

With files from Nicole Weisberg