Typically once temperatures increase and snow begins to melt, people look forward to seeing the sunshine and their grass once again. One couple in Rexburg, however, had an extra surprise when the snow in their backyard began to melt…a dead moose. Erin LeFevre was baffled when her husband, Landon LeFevre, noticed through their window Saturday morning, something strange. “I was like, ‘Are you sure? Is it a deer?’ because we have a little herd of deer that come around the neighborhood. There’s 12 of them that hang out,” Erin LeFevre told EastIdahoNews.com. She said she took her binoculars out to check, and sure enough a dead moose was melting out under piles of snow. “You could just see it being revealed in the middle of the snow,” LeFevre said. LeFevre wasn’t sure whether to put the moose in a burn pile or to bury it, so she did what anyone would do in 2017 – she turned to a Facebook group for a solution. “On ‘Life in Rexburg,’ (the Facebook group she went to search for answers) someone will tell me what to do with that dead moose,” LeFevre said. The first few comments told her to contact the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. Soon she was in contact with the department, and later that afternoon officers were able to remove the moose from her backyard. “It got bigger as they uncovered it from the snow and it was huge,” LeFevre said. So how did the poor thing die? “The only thing the officers were able to determine was that it was an adult cow that was in pretty bad body condition,” Losinski said. “In this case it looks like it was in bad shape and then died and then it was covered up by snow.” Losinski said the animal carcass was fairly deteriorated and there wasn’t much to check out. “It died probably of malnutrition or something related to that,” Losinski said. As for the LeFevre’s they’re happy to have the animal out of their yard. They say they continue to get remarks about the experience some are calling ‘a typical Idaho thing.’ “People think it’s either funny, or sad, or amazing,” LeFevre said.
