Common Eland vs Alaskan Moose

[Johnson]

Someone else from a knife forum mentioned how effective and durable horns are in comparison to antlers.That being said, cattle horns might be different from antelope horns.

"Knife collector and bladeforum.com 1 poster for more than 10 years now. Antler is more brittle and prone to cracking while horn shrinks and warps in time. As a utility knife, the horn is superior (IMHO) because of its yield and also because bloody gunk makes it actually grippier. I experimented using cow’s blood. Here in the Philippines, farmers press small wounds onto an ox’s horn to stanch the bleeding."

boards.straightdope.com/t/how-strong-durable-are-antlers-not-urgent/646783

[Hardcastle]

Horns are more flexible, so less brittle, yes, because they're fucking fingernails. I don't know what to say except get an antler, hold it in your hand, feel the weight, run your finger over the point, imagine being stabbed by it. It could not possibly be a more devastating weapon. Horns aren't shit in comparison. That doesn't mean horned animals aren't more dangerous than antlered animals, but the antler is a more deadly weapon than a horn and it's not close. At all.

[wermthewerm]

If we go by the weights listed in the original post, the eland wins due to weight advantage. At similar sizes, I'd favor the moose over reasons I've gone through on Carnivora.

I'll go over a few of them here. For one, the moose is generally a more aggressive and territorial animal, so even in a fight to the death, a bull moose would most likely be the one to instigate the bout, putting the eland at a disadvantage.

Secondly, moose can inflict deadlier injuries onto similar-sized animals in a fight than elands can (The only cases i've seen of elands injuring/killing similar sized animals was killing a giraffe that got *stuck in a fence* in captivity). Moose meanwhile suffer from around 30-50 puncture wounds per fight during rut, and roughly 2-5% of all moose fights end in death.

Source

People favoring the eland seem to think that a moose's antlers would just randomly snap and break mid-fight.

<-- Size comparison of a common eland and an alaskan moose. The moose model I use for these comparisons is definitely not the bulkiest/most robust moose, but neither is the eland model. I feel like if you squished a moose down so that it's the height of the eland, the musculature would be rather similar. The moose's long legs make the muscles look a bit stretched.

Intraspecific fights between moose look more fast-paced and intense than fights between elands, and as I've shown, appear to lead to injury more. Elands can definitely injure each other in fights, but they do not do so as much as moose. A lot of the large bull moose you can find images of have noticeable scars on their heads and bodies.

This is just one example of a battle scarred bull moose, though. I'd be interested to find images of bull elands with battle scars as well.

It's a close match, but I think a bull moose in peak rut may be too much for a similar sized common eland bull to handle, but it would put up one hell of a fight.