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ISHPEMING - Donna Richards said she couldn't sleep the night after the cow moose was shot. The idea of the animal being put down and the two calves wandering alone throughout the night was too much for her.

"I am sick to my stomach over this," said Richards, an Ishpeming resident. "I think it's terrible that she was shot. I really think that there could have been a different way for it to be handled."

Richards is just one of many citizens who have raised an outcry over the death of the cow moose, which was shot by Michigan Department of Natural Resources officials Monday afternoon on the Iron Ore Heritage Trail just east of the Brownstone building. The animal had been in town since 8 a.m. and was killed at about 3:45 p.m.

"They probably didn't have a choice in the very, very end," Richards said. "But I do think that if it had been handled differently, it wouldn't have ended like that."

But Brian Roell, a wildlife biologist with the DNR, said after the options attempted by the Ishpeming City Police Department and other officials, there really wasn't any other choice.

Roell said that using tranquilizers wasn't an option. Due to the size of the animal, the drug that would have had to been used and the state of heightened alertness it was in, any use of tranquilizers would have likely killed the moose.

"Using drugs is not an easy thing to do," Roell said. "Bad things can happen. By the time we had the opportunity to do it, she was in such a state that if we had put drugs in her she would have lost the ability to thermally regulate and would have overheated, gone into shock and died."

Police and DNR representatives have said that public interference led to the demise of the cow moose. Because people went around barricades and disobeyed police requests to remove themselves from the area, the officers weren't able to move the animals in the direction they wanted to, officials said.

Throughout the day the cow became separated from her two calves, one of which was tranquilized and removed from the area Tuesday. Ishpeming police, DNR officials and Michigan State Police tranquilized the animal and moved it to an undisclosed location near Deer Lake.

"It was healthy and quite feisty when we let it go," Roell said. "In fact, it started waking up a little earlier than we wanted it to in the back of the truck."

The second calf has been reported behind the Ishpeming National Guard Armory, but a check of the area produced no evidence of it, Roell said.

Concerned citizens like Richards have wondered why the calf could be tranquilized but the cow couldn't.

"The big difference in this is that this animal was 200 to 250 pounds," Roell said. "The cow was 800 or 900 pounds. It took six of us to move the calf out from the area behind Burger King to the truck. There's no way we could have moved a cow moose."

In addition, the calf was standing still when it was shot with the dart, not running across town, he said.

Ishpeming City Manager Al Bakalarski said many people are asking for police Chief Jim Bjorne's resignation via e-mail and phone calls. But Richards said she isn't sure she would be so extreme despite being upset about the cow's death.

"I don't know if I'd go that far," she said. "I think it should have been handled differently, yes. There should have been better crowd control. There were bad decisions. But the crowd should have known better and the police and the DNR should have known better. A lot of people are to blame, not just one."

Bjorne said he planned to address the moose euthanizing at tonight's Ishpeming City Council meeting. The council meets at 7 p.m. at the Senior Citizens Center.

Richards said she's now mostly worried about the two young moose and thinks that's where public concern should fall.

"Why not capture them and bring them somewhere to be taken care of until they can survive on their own?" she asked, mentioning local zoos like DeYoung in Wallace. "And I hope people know better than to approach them and bother them if they come back into town. Just leave them alone."