This is such a wild and true story that I had no idea was a thing! There was a woman named Jane Baton who lived on the South Shore who, for years, tamed and trained moose. Buckle up for this one!
A huge shout-out to Shelburne’s Museums by the Sea for posting this story the other day. It’s a weird one.
Apparently, back in the 1800s, a woman named Jane Baton was born and would grow up to be a celebrated “Moose Hunter.” Although she was not known for killing moose, but rather taming them for sale to zoos!
She would go into the woods with her dog during calving season and look for twins with their mother. She had trained her dog to run after the mother moose to scare it off, and then she would capture one of the twins and bring it home with her.
Once home, Jane would bottle-feed the calf with cow’s milk and apparently some foliage from the area where she found the calf! She’d raise them to be tame around humans. She’d sell some to zoos, and the ones she didn’t sell, she’d tie bells around their necks and send them back to the forest so hunters would know they were hers. Apparently, they would continue to come back to her throughout their lives.
This might seem like a fairytale, but there is quite a bit of documented evidence of this, including the picture above. She was well known worldwide as a force of nature when it came to training animals and became a living legend of her time!
Jane passed away in 1899, but what a life she lived.
Check out the museum post for more info! What a wild story!
