Joe Louis, the world heavyweight boxing champion, when asked about a challenger, famously remarked, “He can run, but he can’t hide.” Some say the same about retirement from public office. So I asked Rick Sinnott, a former wildlife biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, whether he had done anything unethical during his 28 years with the department. 

“No,” he said.

Sinnott now writes a column for Alaska Dispatch.  I asked him if he had seen the comments posted in response to his recent column, “Corey Rossi and the 30 Bear Weekend.”  One anonymous reader, DearGaslighteRick, leveled several ethics charges against Sinnott.  The chief accusation was: “Aren't you the same public official who told the world that you knew of only one healthy moose calf killed in 15 years, yet you publicly stated that you had a "secret calf disposal site?"

“No,” he said, “not quite.”

Sinnott acknowledged having been a public official; however, he knows thousands of healthy moose calves are killed every year, mostly by predators.  In Anchorage, scores of healthy moose calves are also killed by vehicles, dogs, and fences.  What Sinnott “told the world” was that he had killed a single healthy moose calf.

Sinnott retired in 2010 after 16 years as the Anchorage area wildlife biologist.  In early June 2005, a young moose calf pinned itself between the slats of a picket fence. The homeowner released the calf, but in struggling to get free it had damaged its spine and couldn’t stand. “I’d seen a couple examples of this before,” Sinnott said, “I even took one calf to a veterinarian, but they always died.”  This, in other words, was not a healthy calf.

Sinnott euthanized the calf, but couldn’t retrieve it because its mother was highly agitated, and he didn’t want to be forced to shoot the cow in self-defense.  The next day, after the cow had wandered off, Sinnott picked up the dead calf.  When reporter Anne Aurand of the Anchorage Daily News asked what he was going to do with it, Sinnott told her he would take it to “my secret calf disposal site.”

The secret site

Sinnott often tweaked reporters, but he really did have a secret calf disposal site.  He was frequently called upon to dispose of dead moose.  Some had starved to death. Some had been sick. Some were hit by a vehicle or tangled in a fence. Some were killed by bears.  

Most dead moose were salvaged for human consumption.  On average, about 160 moose are killed in collisions with vehicles in Anchorage every year.  Some years Sinnott also shot one or two moose considered a serious threat to the public, such as repeatedly charging bikers from the woods.  All of these were salvaged by organizations from a list maintained by Alaska State Troopers.  

If he didn’t know the cause of death or if the moose had been dead a day or more, Sinnott had four choices.  

• Find a trapper who was willing to remove the moose for bait. Trappers remove 20 or so dead moose from Anchorage every winter but, because trapping seasons end in mid to late winter, Sinnott had fallback options.  

• Tell the homeowner to deal with the dead moose.  

• Take it to the landfill.  

• Take it somewhere else.

Moving a dead moose is not easy.  Most adult moose weigh 700 to 1,000 pounds.  By October, even calves weigh 300 to 350 pounds.  Some moose carcasses are found in a road right-of-way or other public area, like a park or military reservation.  In these situations, Sinnott contacted the land manager and asked them to remove the carcass.  Moose found dead on private property are the responsibility of the property owner.  In rare situations, a homeowner was elderly or ill equipped to deal with a dead moose, so Sinnott or another Fish and Game employee took the moose away.