It wasn’t your ordinary fire call. The South Summit Fire District answered a call from dispatch about a young elk caught in a fence in Oakley, a small community about 45 miles east of Salt Lake City, Utah. It had one of its front legs stuck between two sections of fencing and another underneath, and spent the night that way.
“When we arrived, we tried to use a jack to jack the panels up, and that didn’t help it,” Tyler Lewis, South Summit Fire District captain, told KPCW-FM. “It is just making it tighter, so we had one of our engines come over, and when they arrived, we used what we call the jaws of life that we cut people out of cars with. We used the spreader on that and just spread the two panels apart, and we were able to spread it far enough. We just pushed her leg out, and she jumped right up.”
Lewis said the elk was pretty weak since it tried to head butt him but didn’t have the energy to do so with any force. It then ran off to join the nearby herd.
(Photo credit: South Summit Fire District)