New Poaching Scheme Alert

A San Antonio Express article warned Hill Country residents about a new scam to shoot deer on other people’s property.

The Kerrvi l le Police warned that bad boys posed as researchers from Texas A&M and wanted to take deer samples from residents’ property to test them for Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD). “Taking” here means shooting them.

Nice try, guys. But if you think the average rural landowner is dumb enough to fall for that, you’ve terribly underestimated them.

Landowners in the hills that I know are plenty savvy about deer and door-to -door salespeople. They may not treat them quite like Robert Duvall and his shotgun did in “Secondhand Lion,” but they might have thought about it.

Poachers have tried lots of approaches that didn’t work. A man I knew in Rio Grande City thought he could throw a perfectly good .222 caliber rifle with a six- power scope out of a truck’s window as the driver raced around a left-hand curve in the road, thinking the game warden chasing them wouldn’t see him toss it. The warden had witnessed them loading a deer into their truck. Both were charged with poaching.

Another man hunted a large South Texas ranch frequently and had buried clothes and boots that he had carved the soles shaped to leave cattle’s hoof prints so the rancher wouldn’t know he had been there. He was later arrested during game wardens’ “Operation Venado Macho,” which roughly translates ”Masculine Deer.”

One man poached often, but a game warden figured out that the poacher had his wife drop him off along a ranch’s fence line and return later at night to pick him up. By not leaving a vehicle parked on the roadside, he got away with it regularly. A warden convinced the poacher’s wife to let him ride with her when she picked up the poacher one night. The poacher threw a buck into the truck bed and jumped into the truck thinking he was breaking free … until a voice from the back seat said, “HOWDY!”

A rugged poacher also dodged wardens for several years by getting a ride to a ranch, climbing a high fence, and hunting the ranch for several nights at a time. He slept in the brush by day and hunted at night. He packed canned provision and didn’t build fires. He was finally caught in the brush and surrendered without a fight.

On our lease, a poacher piled corn on OUR side of the fence to attract deer and hogs, figuring it wouldn’t be detected. We spotted the large corn pile and blood while duck hunting after north zone deer season ended. The area warden investigated, asked other ranchers about vehicles they had seen on the property after deer season, and saw a suspect truck leaving the adjoining ranch to our lease. The driver was surprised at being caught, and confessed.

So, beware that Game Wardens will probably catch you if you poach!

And please don’t tempt landowners. They might have seen “Secondhand Lion.”