No need to bar the doors in Bethel. Men, women, children and pets are usually safe.

If you’ve got a life-size stuffed animal in front of your home or business, though, a lockdown is advised. Not that it’ll help.

Ellen Whitney surrenders. After six-and-a-half years bearing the brunt of backwoods hooliganism that would make those redneck stereotype comedians Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy blush, the co-owner of Maine Line Products says you won’t have her moose to kick around any more.

Or ride, steal, whip, deface and otherwise molest.

“We’ve tried to put him back together many times,” Whitney said. “Last time, the beating pretty much cut his head off. I don’t think I can fix that.”

Right now, you and I are trying to calculate the level of drunkenness and/or boredom required to look your friends squarely in the eye and suggest that it’d be fun to go beat the bejeebers out of an artificial moose.

Whitney, on the other hand, isn’t even shocked. Not anymore.

Patting his head

When she and her husband, Richard, opened a second outdoors shop in nearby Locke Mills in 1997, they celebrated by adorning the front lawn of each store with its own moose.

Five feet tall and six feet long, built with wooden frames and covered with a furry material that weathered the harsh, mountain winters, each moose was more than a glorified billboard.

Think postcard fodder. Virtual celebrities who did everything but sign autographs.

“They became a real source of community pride, especially in Bethel,” Whitney said. “People would walk by and pat his head like he was a real animal.”

In the winter, the Whitneys live in the upstairs portion of the original storefront at 23 Main St. in Bethel.

While watching television there one night, she heard a commotion worthy of an off-season thunderstorm. Turns out it was the cacophony of slamming car doors, lighted by flickering flashbulbs.

“People were walking through a snowbank to take a picture with the moose,” she said.

Wild stuff, especially when you consider the family’s tireless effort to keep the mascots photogenic. On most days, the two moose wore as many stitches and bandages as a post-operative patient on an episode of “Extreme Makeover.”

Once or twice in a good year, Whitney said, each received a “mauling.” A little stuffing lost here, a broken leg there. Repairs, though extensive, weren’t usually visible with the naked, windshielded eye.

Boasting later

Whitney is pretty sure she can describe some of the perpetrators.

“In their early 20s and drunk out of their minds,” she said.

Good guess. Not that we’re profiling or anything.

Actually, she has a better idea who stole the Locke Mills moose in April. After an amateurish effort that left behind a leg that was padlocked to the ground, the suspected juvenile delinquent boasted of his handiwork in the hallways at Telstar Regional High School.

Oops. One of Ellen’s children attends that school.

Charges haven’t yet been filed in the disappearance, in part because the three-legged victim remains missing.

That episode pushed the Whitneys’ patience to the brink. Then the Bethel beating three weeks ago was the straw that broke the moose’s back.

Winner, and still champion, the bad guys.

The artificial moose are “not cheap to make or cheap to fix, so they’re not going to be here anymore,” Whitney said.

Not so fast. One local handyman has volunteered his time and tools to see if the Bethel landmark is salvageable. He told Whitney that his relatives from New Jersey “really get a kick” out of the moose.

It’s those other bizarre kicks people got out of ’em that leave me almost speechless.

Kalle Oakes is staff columnist. He may be reached by e-mail at [email protected].