Hi Katie's Mom.....good question....
When hunting moose you have to enter a draw for which animal you want to hunt: Bull, Cow or Calf. Bull tags are hard to draw, and Cow isn't much easier. Calf tags are pretty easy to get. Up here in Ontario we now have a points system for the moose tag draw.....you gain a point for every year you didn't draw/buy a tag. If you draw and purchase a tag, your points go to zero and you start over again. To get a bull tag last year in the area that we hunt the minimum number of points was 22, 19 for a cow and only 9 for a calf. A cow tag is actually a moose antllerless tag.....good for cow or calf.
A decent sized calf can easily hit 350-400 lbs....almost double the size of even a larger deer. The meat tastes a lot like lean beef and so is quite prized and calves are usually a bit more tender than the older animals. Worth noting is that the winter mortality rate for yearling moose calves is close to 50%. The thinking is that hunting them doesn't affect the number that survive the winter that much.
It used to be, till last year, that if you bought a moose tag, you could hunt a calf and the ministry only had draws for adult animals, but that changed last year and now all moose tags are on a draw system. calves included.
A bull can easily top 1000 lbs and a cow, 800-900 lbs. Moose hunting is typically party hunting, since when an animal hits the ground the "real" work starts! Even a calf is tough to field dress and move around by yourself. So long as at least one of your gang has a valid tag, the whole group can hunt. Our preference is to have two tags.....one adult and one calf. That way you don't use an adult tag on a calf, and often you can get both since calves are typically always with a cow.
This year I only have 10 points accrued.....and have applied for a calf tag in the draw, since I should be pretty much guaranteed one with that many points. Another benefit of the calf tag is that it's good for the the archery season, 1st week of October, and the gun hunt too, 3rd week of October. Adult tags are specific to either bow or gun season....and since I want to do a backwoods camping archery hunt the first week and also the gun hunt with my usual hunt camp guys, a calf tag lets me do both. Though at least one of our gang that has more points will be applying for an adult tag in the draw for the gun hunt.