YouTube video by LastWeekTonight

Feb. 17, 2026, 4:55 a.m. ET The morning of Jan. 6, Moose and her sister Monkey got loose. They had escaped the fenced confines of Michelle Bair’s yard before, Moose being quite the escape artist. More often than not when the sibling pooches breached the fence, the sisters would head to the stream that runs through Michelle’s rural homestead in Airville, “the boonies,” as she describes the area, surrounded by Amish farms and woods, and come home soaking wet. They have been with Michelle – Moose is more her son Layne’s dog – since they were born, the offspring of a Labrador retriever and a St. Bernard, “labernards,” Michelle calls them. They are intelligent, gentle dogs. Michelle’s six grandchildren love them, and they are great with the kids. Moose and Monkey are members of the family, as anyone who has a dog can attest. Moose and Monkey had air tags on their collars, but in her rural area, the devices aren’t very effective. Many of her neighbors are Amish, and for the tags to be effective, they have to be in the vicinity of a cell phone, Michelle said. That Tuesday morning was the first they had escaped from the fenced yard in months, Michelle said. Later, when she reviewed video shot by a security camera mounted on her house, she was able to piece together some of what happened. At about 8 that morning, the video showed Moose and Monkey leaving the yard. At 9:06 a.m., the video showed, Monkey raced past the camera, running as fast as she could. “I’d never seen her run like that,” she said. “Something must have scared her.” At 10:23 a.m., Monkey and Moose appeared on the recording, emerging from the woods and approaching the house; Monkey had apparently circled back to look for her sister, Michelle reasoned. Immediately, she could tell something was wrong with Moose. “You could see it,” Michelle said. “It was very evident. She was bleeding from the mouth.” More animal deaths: New Oxford barn fire kills goats, leaves steer missing She wasn’t home when it happened; she was at work, having just returned to her job two days before as an inventory specialist at Tate Access Floors in Red Lion after being off with an illness. The first she heard about what happened was when 19-year-old Layne called her. “There’s something wrong with Moose,” Layne told his mother. He got Moose into the house, and she went to the bathroom to lie down on the floor. Blood was flowing from her muzzle. “She’s hurt,” he told her. Something else was odd, he told her. Her collar was missing. Layne took Moose to the Mason-Dixon Animal Emergency Hospital in Shrewsbury. “At that point,” Michelle said, “we didn’t know what happened to her. We just knew she was injured.” When the vet told them what happened, they were shocked. Moose had been shot in the mouth, the vet told them. At very close range. The vet was not hopeful. She could operate, she told them, but she couldn’t guarantee that the surgery would be helpful. Moose’s tongue, Michelle said, “looked like hamburger.” She was suffering. They had little choice but to end Moose’s life. “There was no hope,” Michelle said. Moose would have been 3 years old on May 21. Her son, who normally is not very emotional, was broken up about Moose’s passing, his grief and tears piercing through his usual stoicism, she said. She can tell that Monkey misses her sister. “She’s very sad,” Michelle said. After, the vet pulled Michelle aside and told her Moose’s collar was missing, which was odd and meant that someone had to get very close to her. She also told Michelle that the X-rays showed metal shards – bullet fragments – at the front of her muzzle, which meant, Michelle said, “someone put a weapon in her mouth and shot.” The vet advised her to call the police. State police – which covers Lower Chanceford Township – took statements from the family and then followed a blood trail about 100 yards from the house. Police told her they believed Moose was shot with a BB gun, a high-powered CO2-propelled pellet gun. Michelle was skeptical of that, from what the vet told her about the X-ray, which also showed that the projectile had lodged in the back of Moose’s neck. The state police told her they would investigate. The next day, Michelle and members of her family traced the blood trail to the back of her property, losing it on the leafy floor of the woods and to the dark. She obtained flashlights that use UV light to trace bodily fluids, but still, they lost the trail in the woods. The next day, she said, it rained and the trail was gone. She has suspicions about what happened to Moose. A couple of years ago, she said, a neighbor’s dog wandered off his property and was never seen again. She shared her suspicion with the state police troopers, who told her they need more than that to be able to proceed. She has no idea what kind of person would shoot a dog in the mouth. Moose, she said, “Wouldn’t hurt anybody.” She was friendly with everybody and everything, including the two pigs and the donkey she keeps on her property. All her Amish neighbors know Moose, she said. At this point, she said, she is hoping the person who shot Moose will slip up and tell someone about shooting the dog in the mouth. “We just need the right person to say the wrong thing,” she said. “That’ll bring some closure.” Columnist/reporter Mike Argento has been a York Daily Record staffer since 1982. Reach him at [email protected].