Car Shopping

Talk about sticker shock. A moose decided he needed a new set of wheels, so he visited a Colorado dealership to scope out the Aston Martins.

A lost 800-pound moose scoped out the new cars at a Broomfield auto dealership Friday morning before running toward some willows and being felled by a tranquilizer darts.

"It certainly was big enough that none of us wanted to approach it," Eric Erbsland, sales manager at Sill-TerHar's Ford-Lincoln-Mercury dealership, said of the unusual visitor. "He started out at our service department then ran all the way through, past every single new car, then pulled a U-turn and ran right at us. That's when we ran.

"He then ran through all the Aston Martins and Volvos."

"It definitely was not ideal moose habitat," Division of Wildlife spokeswoman Jennifer Churchill said of the crossroads where U.S. 36, U.S. 287 and Colorado 121 come together at an industrial park in Broomfield.

The moose shrugged off the first tranquilizer dart, went down when hit by a second but then got up and headed farther north before finally being quelled by a third, Churchill said.

They hauled the moose away to a remote location. As he was being driven off, he was heard to mutter, "That's the last time I shop there."