Moose cavalry

[1] Moose were also more susceptible to disease than horses and there was difficulty in feeding the animals which were used to foraging across large areas rather than being fed on fodder in pasture.

[7] Some news outlets have reported that Joseph Stalin attempted to introduce the moose as a replacement for horses in Soviet cavalry regiments based in the northern parts of the country during the 1930s.

[9] Among the more outlandish claims was that the start of the war was postponed to avoid clashing with the moose mating season and that the animals could distinguish between the Russian and Finnish languages at a distance of over a kilometre.

These were in fact posed by members of Popular Mechanics' publishing house dressed in reproduction Red Army uniforms with the moose superimposed in post-processing.

A graphics artist, Vitas Chernyauskas, mocked-up the front cover of an instruction manual for the unit, based on contemporary Soviet documents and this was also included in the article.

[11] In 2017, a war museum in Lakhdenpokhya, Karelia, Russia showcased the doctored photographs from the Popular Mechanics article in an exhibition as a recent discovery of historic documents.

[12] The erroneous story is still available on the Yle website, including the doctored images from Popular Mechanics, but with a disclaimer and link to the Council for Mass Media's findings.

[8] The National Archives of Finland state that the Red Army did use limited numbers of moose during the Second World War, though as pack or draft animals, not as mounts.