A group of kind-hearted Wyoming men stopped to rescue a pronghorn that had become tangled in barbed wire, but had a shock when it ran off with one of their shoes.
Jaymie Litzel, Kyle Litzel, and Kyle Bachand set out to rescue the pronghorn, which had become tangled in barbed wire. Two of the men dealt with the wire, which the third recorded the encounter, which he later shared on Facebook.
As USA Today reports, one of the three leans in to cut the wire while another uses his foot to keep the pronghorn's head still and prevent it thrashing. However, as you can see in the video below, once the wire is cut the animal springs free, knocks him off balance, and sprints away, taking his shoe with it.
Pronghorn are often known as pronghorn antelope due to their resemblance to the antelope of Africa and Asia. However, they are actually a distinct species, whose closest relatives are the giraffe and okapi.
They can also be mistaken for deer at a distance, but as the National Park Service explains, pronghorn are much smaller, with characteristic white markings on the rump, side, belly, and throat.
Unlike deer's antlers, their horns have a bony core and aren't shed after mating season. Both sexes have horns, but only the males (known as bucks) have the sharp prongs that give the animals their name.
As Bachand and the two Litzel brothers discovered, pronghorn are also incredibly fast, able to run at 55mph for half a mile, and 45mph for much longer distances. This lets it easily outrun predators, and it's suspected that it may have developed this astonishing speed in order to outrun the now-extinct American cheetah. Whatever the reason though, the shoe is long gone by now.
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