Loose moose causes a stir at Saratoga

A yearling cow moose wandered onto the grounds of Saratoga Race Course early Monday morning, creating a buzz in the city but doing no damage or disruption to the track.

According to Kevin Gremillion, the New York Racing Association's operations manager for Saratoga, local police were alerted in the early-morning hours Monday that a moose was wandering Broadway, a main thoroughfare in Saratoga Springs. By 6 a.m., she had wandered onto Frank Sullivan Place near the track, strolling along the fence. Saratoga police requested that NYRA security open the Lincoln Avenue entrance to the track in order to keep the moose out of harm's way as well as to ensure the safety of pedestrians and drivers until workers from the Department of Environmental Conservation could arrive.

A veterinary staff from the DEC was summoned, and they tranquilized the moose, who according to Gremillion was a little more than a year old and weighed between 500 and 600 pounds. The staff then checked the moose out physically and gave her some water to cool her down, Gremillion said.

The moose was removed on a stretcher and put into a trailer designed to haul large animals and she was taken about 10 or 20 miles north of Saratoga into an area known as Lake Desolation where there is a fairly dense moose population, according to a spokesman with the DEC.

At this time of year, only the Oklahoma training track is open for training, and the majority of horses are stabled on that side of the facility. Gremillion said there was a Skidmore College horse show taking place on the grounds of the main track, but the moose didn't get near any of those horses.