A series of articles in the local paper about deer raised in captivity, usually bred for a super-sized rack, and then released for hunters, and how various state and federal government regulations - and lack of regulations that create arbitrary treatment by government - are creating problems for an industry that already has problems of its own.
This is the first one in the series, that introduces the start to the industry....
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A troubling industry is born
BALTIC, OHIO — In 1974, Amish dairy farmer Abe Miller bought two white-tailed fawns to keep as pets, and he ended up helping launch an industry — one whose practices would later give him pause.
Miller never imagined that the offspring of those two deer would help fuel a new enterprise devoted to breeding big-antlered deer.
Wildlife officials also never saw it coming.
“If everybody could step back in time 30 years, or if we had a crystal ball back then, probably the states would have been much more restrictive,” said Harry Jacobson, a professor emeritus of wildlife ecology and management at Mississippi State University. “And it would have never, never come to this.”
Though wildlife officials now roundly advise against taking in wild deer, back then, Pennsylvania’s wildlife officers sometimes sold wild fawns to farmers after well-meaning people captured them, believing their mothers had died or abandoned them.
Miller had a man drive him to Pennsylvania, where he paid $75 apiece for a doe and a buck. They put them in a large drum in the back of the van and took them home to the rolling hills of eastern Ohio, where the roads are rutted by the constant traffic of buggy wheels.
The family named them Bobby and Betsy. Bobby was later nicknamed “Buster.” They were an instant hit.
“We had a little baby girl that summer in August, and that month after we’d gotten these fawns, we got a lot of visitors, supposedly to see the baby,” Miller said. “But they wanted to see the fawns. My dad always teased me. He said, ‘More people are coming to look at the deer than the baby.’ ”
At age 2, Betsy had two fawns, and when they were old enough, Miller released them into the wild with permission from an Ohio wildlife official.
Releasing farm-raised deer into the wild now is expressly forbidden in almost every state. But back then, some deer breeders had permission to restock the wild herds, which were rebounding after being wiped out by habitat loss and over-hunting in many parts of the country.
Soon, everyone seemed to want in on Miller’s hobby.
Deer hobby breeds profit
Some of Miller’s Amish neighbors wanted their own deer. The first fawns he sold went for $75 each. There was so much demand for his deer that he stopped releasing them into the wild about 1980. At first, he said, his neighbors wanted them as pets.
“At that time, most were more like myself,” he said. “They were people that loved deer and just wanted to have a few deer around.”
But they also took pride in breeding deer with big antlers.
Miller eventually bred Buster with a doe named Nanny. In 1983, Nanny had a single buck fawn that would turn Miller’s hobby — and that of others like him — into an industry that now finds itself at odds with the same wildlife agencies that permitted the breeding operations.
The deer’s name was Patrick. And his antlers grew at a shocking rate.
He sprouted 12 full points as a yearling, a time when most bucks’ antlers are little taller than their ears. A couple of years later, he sprouted nontypical points, which are regarded as rare and desirable by trophy hunters because the tines jut out at odd angles.
Tales of Patrick’s incredible rack spread to Texas, where there was a growing demand for big-bodied Midwestern bucks to breed with the slender whitetails that lived amid the mesquite trees and cacti.
“Word got around,” Miller said. “And we got a nice price for him.”
Miller received $7,500 for Patrick in 1987, when he was shipped to Texas. But Miller kept some of Patrick’s fawns.
“People would come from all over the country to buy stock from Patrick,” Miller said. “Anything they could buy, you know.”
By the 1990s prices for big breeder deer started skyrocketing. The hobby was now a full-blown industry.
Fast-forward to today
At the North American Deer Farmers Association annual conference last spring in Cincinnati, Amish men with black flat-brimmed hats shot tranquilizer darts at a target. Onlookers rooted them on.
Glossy pamphlets with huge bucks on the cover advertised vials of deer semen from bucks with names such as Ballistic, Cardiac Kid, Fear Factor and Primetime. Antlers were mounted on display booths as far as the eye could see.
Thirty-nine years after Miller took in Bobby and Betsy, this is what the deer-breeding industry looks like today.
The four-day conference at the Millennium Hotel drew 750 people from across the country.
Top deer are DNA-tested and have long, elaborate pedigrees. The deer farmers’ association national DNA registry boasts “145,000 animals tested.” The animals with the best certified lines fetch top dollar.
At the conference’s auction, the day’s top seller was a deer that went for $115,000. Three does sold for a total of $225,000. The previous year, a group of six bucks sold for $750,000.
Lester Eicher, an Amish farmer from Grabill, Ind., has had some success at such auctions, though not the six-figure kind. One of his does sold for $20,000 at a 2012 auction.
Eicher was particularly proud of selling a “really powerhouse doe” on the open market for $65,000. Not bad for a farmer who works a 10-acre plot of land, a 2½-hour drive from Indianapolis. He keeps 83 deer.
“I have a construction business, too,” said Eicher, speaking slowly and deliberately with the faintest hint of a Pennsylvania Dutch accent. “But this has been doing really well for us. We was in the horses, you know, buying and selling horses. But deer have, by far, raised us more money.”
Shooters and breeders rule
Shawn Schafer, the North American Deer Farmers Association’s executive director, said about 25 percent of deer and elk farmers diversify their incomes by selling venison to specialty meat markets. Others also supply elk-antler velvet to companies selling sprays to athletes as steroid alternatives. Some collect urine from does in heat to be sold as randy buck attractants used by hunters, Schafer said at the Cincinnati conference.
But the big money and the largest segment of the industry are in breeding and selling what are known as “shooter bucks,” animals to be hunted on fenced preserves.
In the beginning, top dollars were paid for “breeder bucks,” but deer farmers have since discovered does often carry the genetics that produce big racks. They, too, now command high prices.
“When you’re focusing on the antlers, you’re only looking at 50 percent, and some people will tell you it’s actually less than that,” said Schafer, a deer farmer from North Dakota.
Schafer, a snake’s rattle dangling from the band of his black cowboy hat, hurried from place to place at the conference, coordinating vendors and the speakers holding panels on such topics as “Update on Anesthetics for Deer,” “Fawn Management and Colostrum” and “Biosecurity on Deer Farms.”
Tales from the deer trade
A video posted on several deer-breeding websites provides a glimpse into a world Miller never envisioned. The video opens with five men wrestling a white-tailed buck into a metal chute. The deer’s eyeballs bulge as the animal thrashes in pure terror. One man crams a cuplike device wrapped in duct tape over the buck’s mouth and nose. It’s connected to a tube pumping tranquilizer gas. They wrap a pink blanket over the buck’s eyes. Its thrashing slowly subsides.
One of the men gets to work on the deer’s hindquarters.
He inserts a probe into the deer’s anus and places a camouflage-covered bag with a funnel attachment over the deer’s genitals. He gradually turns a knob on a yellow box. The deer’s back legs shake as the probe’s electrical current causes the deer to ejaculate into the funnel.
After collecting the semen, the men saw off the animal’s antlers for safety in the pens.
The last shot of this video, set to cheerful music, shows the wobbly legged buck with just nubs on its head being released into its pen.
The video demonstrates one method used to harvest one of the most lucrative products: semen.
That harvest has proved to be particularly bountiful for Eddie Ray Borkholder, Bremen, Ind. He stores thousands of containers of semen from about 40 bucks in a liquid nitrogen-filled tank. Each container, called a straw, holds enough semen to impregnate two does through artificial insemination.
Some straws, he said, could sell for as much as $20,000 if the high-demand buck has died. Most of the semen Borkholder has for sale ranges from $450 to $2,500 per straw.
Borkholder says he typically extracts semen once each fall, sometimes twice. Each buck averages 80 to 90 straws in a single extraction.
“I’ve had as much as 200 straws,” Borkholder said, “but that’s an exception.”
He said farmers could extract semen more than twice a year, but he prefers not to because it causes too much stress. Several deer farmers told The Indianapolis Star that stress is a leading cause of death among their skittish animals, and it’s a main reason tranquilizer darts and gas are used when handling the deer.
Patrick makes X-Factor
In the mid-1990s, as the sale of shooter bucks took off, Borkholder paid $500 each for three does from Patrick’s line. He wasn’t alone.
Miller said that if you could trace most of the white-tailed deer standing in America’s deer pens — and, by extension, the trophies hanging on many preserve hunters’ walls — their pedigrees would include some of Patrick’s line.
One of them is an Indiana buck with legendary status. The buck, which sports a tangled crest of tines and drooping points, is kept at a Peru, Ind., deer farm. Its antlers are so large that the 285-pound deer loses more than 100 pounds to grow them each spring.
His name is X-Factor.
Borkholder said he is a 25 percent co-owner of the deer, which includes the Patrick lineage on his mother’s side.
Hyped as the “largest deer in the world,” X-Factor has a rack that measures 580 inches using the breeders’ complicated antler scoring formula. That’s nearly twice the size of the established world record for a wild whitetail. For farm-bred deer, it was considered huge in his day, though he has since been eclipsed by bigger bucks.
Now described as an “old man” on his breeders’ Facebook page, X-Factor still has a fantastic reputation — and price tag.
Industry insiders say X-Factor likely was worth $1 million in his prime and probably at least $500,000 now. His semen is still listed at $2,500 a straw.
Miller views all of this with mixed emotions.
He is thrilled that so many of his friends and fellow breeders have seen so much success, and he credits deer for helping his family pay off its farm when many small livestock operations were struggling. But not every change he has witnessed is for the better.
He said some of the modern breeders’ techniques — the artificial insemination and the use of tranquilizer darts — make him uncomfortable. And he isn’t exactly an ardent supporter of high-fence hunting preserves, which he calls “hunting in pens.”
“I’d want to hunt the deer out in the wild,” he said. “At the same time, if somebody has the money to spend, that’s their business.”
But those aren’t the issues that caused him to sell off his last deer in 2012. It was something beyond his control — the regulations and testing meant to stop the spread of disease.
Glossary
Boone & Crockett Club — A trophy hunting organization that keeps record books based on antler size. The club uses a complicated formula to score antler sizes in inches. It doesn’t include farm-raised deer in its record books.
Bovine TB — Bovine tuberculosis, a bacteria that is infectious to cattle, deer and people.
Breeder — The term deer farmers use to describe a deer kept for breeding purposes.
Buck fever — The nervous excitement hunters feel when they see a trophy buck; also, the nation’s obsession with trophy deer.
CWD — Chronic wasting disease, an always-fatal, contagious deer disease similar to mad cow that spreads via prions, which are misshapen proteins that cause brains to develop spongelike holes.
Deer pen — A fenced enclosure to keep deer, often used interchangeably with high-fence.
High-fence — A generic term describing a fenced hunting preserve.
Lacey Act — Adopted in 1900, this federal anti-poaching law imposes substantial penalties on those who move illegally taken wildlife across state lines. It has been used over the years to prosecute deer smugglers and hunting preserve owners who conducted illegal activities.
Nontypical — A buck whose antlers have points jutting off in a nonsymmetrical shape, often with points poking out at odd angles. These bucks are prized by trophy hunters because they’re rare in the wild.
Public Trust Doctrine — The legal and philosophical principle behind North America’s unique wildlife management systems. It guides state and federal wildlife agencies. Under the doctrine, wildlife belongs to the people and can’t be bought and sold without strict oversight from wildlife agencies.
Rack — A deer’s antlers.
Rut — Deer breeding season when bucks lock antlers to compete for does in heat.
Safari Club International — A trophy hunting organization that keeps record books based on antler size, employing its own formula. The club includes farm-raised deer in its record books.
Shooter — The term deer breeders and hunting preserve owners use to describe a trophy buck sold to be shot.
Straw — A container used to transport deer semen for artificial insemination.
Typical — A buck whose antlers have a symmetrical shape.
http://www.mansfieldnewsjournal.com/...-industry-born
And here is the most recent article....
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What can happen if preserve owners make the rules
At one Indiana high-fence operation, deer - some ill or appearing drugged - were hunted in what prosecutors called 'killing pens.' Today, laws like those that sent the owner to prison are under assault in many states.
PERU, IND. — For seven days in January 2005, a jury in a federal courtroom heard tales from a now-notorious Indiana hunting preserve of deer being drugged and even a sick deer propped up in a 1-acre pen so a hunter could shoot a $15,000 trophy.
Jurors heard testimony from an outdoor television celebrity, a corporate CEO, a country music star and an ex-NFL quarterback, some of whom paid substantial sums to shoot deer in enclosures so small that prosecutors dubbed them “killing pens.” One shot his deer only minutes after it was released from a trailer.
When the prosecution rested its case, the defense team called only one witness — an accountant. He testified that the preserve owner, Russ Bellar, had paid taxes on the deer.
The message was clear to those familiar with the legal complexities surrounding the captive-deer industry: Bellar was saying that he owned the deer; they were no longer part of the publicly owned wild herd from which their ancestors had been taken generations ago. To Bellar, these deer were livestock. His livestock. And the clear implication was that he could do whatever he wanted with them.
Bellar ended up spending nine months in a federal prison. But his argument lives on, and the laws that put him in prison might not. In fact, the principle behind Bellar’s argument has been used by lobbyists across the country and has taken root in the law in numerous states where farms and preserve owners seek to fend off stronger disease controls and hunting ethics rules.
As chronic wasting disease continues to spread — helped along by the captive-deer industry’s brisk interstate trade — deer breeders argue that the current rules are more than adequate. Idaho lawmakers, for example, passed a bill this year that would let elk farms conduct CWD tests on only 10 percent of the animals that die, instead of 100 percent.
Since 2011, lawmakers in at least 14 states have introduced legislation that would loosen regulations on the industry or let it expand into places where either fenced hunting or deer breeding currently is not allowed.
As the lobbyists push their agenda, the crucial debate on those disease and ethics issues appears tangled in arguments about definitions and which agency has oversight. In effect, Bellar’s argument is carrying the day.
With such lobbying, the preserves have already carved out a free-wheeling niche between the laws and the agencies governing livestock and wildlife. The killing of livestock and wild deer is regulated in most states. But The Indianapolis Star’s investigation revealed that in most states that allow fenced hunting, virtually anything goes on the preserves. Baiting deer? Shooting deer in small pens? Selling specific deer to be shot? It’s all good. Practices that landed Bellar in prison are perfectly legal in some states.
Shawn Schafer, executive director of the North American Deer Farmers Association, says hunting preserves should be exempted from some of the rules violated on Bellar’s Place, and his organization is fighting to change them. The more unsporting practices he can’t condone. But he said market forces will ensure they don’t happen on preserves in states where there is no hunting oversight.
“Hunters don’t want to do that stuff,” Schafer said. “Customer satisfaction regulates that right out of business.”
The video evidence and testimony about Bellar’s Place tell a different story.
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In the raw footage from Bellar’s trial, a white-tailed deer with majestic antlers was dying of pneumonia, so sickly that a ranch hand had to poke it with a sharp stick to get it to stand.
On wobbly legs, it toppled over in a snowy thicket. In the next video clip, it appeared to be propped into a standing position, a branch through its antlers.
A few yards away, a camouflaged hunter crouched in the snow, his rifle at the ready. A cameraman stood behind him filming the action, all part of a service for which the hunter paid $15,000.
In the video, the hunter fires and the deer collapses, legs twitching in the snow.
The videographer testified at trial that the hunt took place inside a 1-acre pen.
In an interview late last year, Bellar told The Star it was no big deal.
“He’d have been dead in a couple hours anyway,” he said. “He would have absolutely been dead. That deer was not tranquilized. He was just sick. He
paid for the deer. He absolutely paid for it.”
Who owns the deer?
Each state regulates the captive-deer industry differently. Some have resolved basic issues about whether the animals are classified as livestock. Indiana has not.
Its experience is an example of what can happen when those issues aren’t resolved and agencies try to shoehorn a hybrid industry into regulatory structures that were created separately for agriculture and wildlife.
The captive deer industry has aspects of both, which irks its critics.
“These are livestock while they’re being raised, but the moment they’re released into the game preserve, they become wildlife and available for the hunt,” said Jerry Wheeler, founder of Hoosiers for Ethical Hunting. “It’s a magic transformation.”
Is it really hunting if the animal was raised in captivity from birth? Is it really agriculture if the animal is hunted, rather than slaughtered? And what other farmer lets people pay to shoot his livestock for trophies? Such questions have surrounded the captive-deer industry for years, and they were central to the Bellar case.
The Indiana Department of Natural Resources considered Bellar’s deer to be wildlife subject to game laws. And when Bellar agreed to plead guilty to violating a federal game law and two counts of conspiracy in 2005, the DNR’s argument appeared to have won. Bellar was sent to a federal prison for nine months and agreed to pay $575,000.
Within a few months, the DNR issued an order attempting to shut down the dozen or so high-fence preserves then in Indiana. The preserves filed a lawsuit, and the DNR action was blocked.
Around the time of Bellar’s indictment, state Rep. Bill Friend, R-Macy, asked Indiana’s attorney general to examine the laws governing captive deer. The attorney general’s report revealed that Indiana law contained a number of inconsistencies. One area of the law said all wildlife was considered part of a public trust, owned by the state and managed by the DNR. But various laws also let breeders own deer as long as they had permits from the state. Other provisions even allowed for some deer to be classified as domestic animals or livestock.
But there was a catch.
The attorney general’s report said deer classified as livestock could not be hunted. They had to be killed in licensed slaughterhouses using humane slaughter techniques. The law clearly did not anticipate the deer industry as it evolved.
“Indiana’s existing statutes and rules do not directly address many of the questions surrounding the complicated and controversial issue of hunting privately owned deer kept on private property,” then-chief counsel Greg Zoeller wrote.
Zoeller, now the state’s attorney general, called on the legislature to clear up the law. Legislators, however, balked. It wasn’t until 2013 that a county court ruled the animals were livestock and the DNR therefore had no jurisdiction. The state plans to appeal. For the time being, the DNR is not enforcing hunting laws on the four preserves still operating in Indiana. For now, the preserve owners are free to set their own standards.
As if to emphasize the ambiguity surrounding this industry, however, another county court in Indiana issued a contradictory opinion last year, ruling that the DNR has at least some oversight.
Such ambiguity is not limited to Indiana. The Indianapolis Star investigation found a similar conflict in a Missouri case involving the reimbursement of a farmer for deer that were killed by a neighbor’s dogs. A lower court ruled that the deer were wildlife, and the neighbor therefore was not required to reimburse the farmer. But the decision was overturned by an appeals court that ruled the animals were livestock.
The matter is unresolved in Kentucky, too. Deer behind fences are classified as both livestock and publicly owned wildlife.
“It sounds counterintuitive because it is counterintuitive,” said Kristina Brunjes, the deer and elk program coordinator for the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources.
Brunjes said that even with classifications as “clear as mud,” the deer born and raised in captivity “are treated as livestock,” and the state doesn’t set rules about how they can be hunted.
Kentucky preserves have no bans on hunting at night, using dogs and shooting animals in small pens. Virtually any method a preserve owner deems appropriate is allowed.
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Jeff Wickersham, a former Miami Dolphins backup quarterback, testified at Bellar’s trial that he didn’t get a deer on his first afternoon hunting. That evening, Bellar and his preserve manager, Hinds Tom Jones, showed Wickersham a picture of a big deer and asked if he “wanted to hunt that deer.” Wickersham said he was willing to pay $20,000 to kill it.
When he woke up the next morning, the deer was in a trailer parked outside a pen. Wickersham climbed a tree with a videographer as the trailer door was opened, and the deer wandered into the enclosure.
Frightened and unsure of its new environment, the buck ran into a corner of the pen. After 10 minutes, Bellar, Jones and a farmhand went in and shooed the buck into range of the tree stand where Wickersham was perched with a bow. A videographer filmed the action. The whole episode, from the time the trailer doors opened until the kill shot, took about 30 minutes.
Wickersham, now president of a hose, fittings and industrial supply company in Louisiana, didn’t respond to messages left there.
He was one of more than 30 hunters accused of breaking state hunting laws on Bellar’s property. The hunters were never charged but were called to testify as witnesses.
'The DNR was so jealous'
Stocky, crass and confident, Bellar has a handshake that feels as if it could crush a steel pipe. The Tennessee-born self-made millionaire has an eighth-grade education and says it took him awhile after moving from his boyhood home to get used to flush toilets. Where he grew up, they used outhouses.
He built a highly successful construction business, specializing in industrial hog barns, and isn’t afraid to throw his money around — or brag about his wealth.
Bellar no longer sells hunts but is still a prominent figure in the deer breeding industry. He’s the majority owner of the iconic breeder buck, X-Factor.
At lunch at a dinerin Peru, he peeled $50 from a wad of bills to give to the waitress as a tip. He said his money was one of the reasons his operation was targeted by Indiana’s Department of Natural Resources.
“I think the DNR was so jealous ’cause I was selling deer for hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he said. “And it would take 10 years for them to make what I was making in one day.”
Bellar said his foray into breeding big bucks originated on a hunting trip to Alberta, Canada. He said he was struck by how much money people were willing to spend on deer hunting. He said he saw hundreds of hunters on his trip, many of whom were heading home dejected after not killing a deer, despite spending thousands of dollars on flights and guides.
Bellar thought he could give them more buck for their bang. He soon put up a fence on his property and started charging people to hunt. At that time, it was legal to fence in the wild deer on one’s property, even though wildlife technically belong to the state. So that’s what Bellar did.
By 1999, Bellar had hired a lobbyist, and he helped found the Indiana Deer and Elk Farmers’ Association to push favorable legislation. Bellar, his family and his business have spent about $40,000 on state political campaigns since 1997, according to campaign finance records filed with the Indiana secretary of state, without substantial results.
What’s more, Friend, the legislator who represents Bellar’s district, was also his business partner. Bellar told The Star he built a hog complex for Friend and co-signed on the financing, guaranteeing payment, something he said he has done for many others.
“I made my money off of the building, and Bill, he carried the bill to the House, three or four times for us. Tried to get it passed,” Bellar said.
Friend, who said he still does business with Bellar’s company, said his legislative efforts weren’t focused solely on Bellar’s needs: “When there were issues from other deer farmers who were being told they couldn’t do this or they couldn’t do that, I did try to legislatively clear things up for them.” But his and other bills died because many of the state’s lawmakers found high-fence hunting distasteful.
Anthony Wilson, a captain with the DNR’s law enforcement division, said his office received tips in 2002 that Bellar might be breaking “the laws that he was unsuccessfully trying to change.”
A short while later, undercover agents visited Bellar’s preserve.
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Ronnie Dunn, of the country music duo Brooks & Dunn, testified at Bellar’s trial that his experience at Bellar’s Place “was the same principle” as slaughtering cattle. Conservation officers alleged he killed a buck with a high-caliber rifle, a weapon that’s illegal to use while deer hunting in Indiana. He also never bought a license.
The Star couldn’t reach Dunn for comment through messages left with his publicist and sent through his website and Facebook page.
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Lobbying for more flexibility
Shortly after Bellar’s trial, Friend introduced legislation, which failed, aimed at removing the DNR’s authority to regulate farm-raised deer. It would have put captive deer under the jurisdiction of state agriculture officials.
It was not only meant to help preserves get out from under game laws. Breeders prefer agriculture departments because their mission includes the promotion of farmers and rural economies. Many ag agencies even have marketing arms: “Got Milk?” or “Eat Beef.”
“When’s the last time you saw your local Game and Fish (departments) do that?” asked Schafer, the executive director of the deer farmers association.
The same battlehas been fought across the country. Today, each state has its own approach to deer behind fences. In Texas, the wildlife agency has primary authority. In Idaho and Nebraska, agricultural agencies do. Most, like Indiana, have a joint regulatory structure.
Meanwhile, deer breeders are lobbying for more changes, some of which could inhibit wildlife agencies’ ability to manage disease. Some states have exempted hunting preserves from testing for chronic wasting disease. Others limit the number of animals that need to be tested.
In Missouri, after CWD was found on a preserve and later discovered in the wild for the first time, conservation officials proposed a 180-day moratorium on new deer farms and preserves.
Like Bellar, the Missouri Whitetail Breeders and Hunting Ranch Association began lobbying. The moratorium was almost immediately rescinded.
One lawmaker introduced legislation similar to Friend’s. It, too, would have stripped wildlife officials of their authority over captive herds and given the agriculture department complete oversight. It was reintroduced this year, but it has not yet advanced.
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Fred Rowan, then-CEO of Carter’s Clothing Inc., a baby clothes company, testified at Bellar’s trial that he paid $37,050 to kill three deer in less than six hours with his son, Andy, who shot a buck. Rowan said he killed his first deer a half-hour after he arrived.
His testimony revealed a world that only wealthy trophy hunters inhabit. Before hunting at Bellar’s Place, he had hunted in Michigan on the same trip. He used a Michigan broker to book his hunts.
Explaining the process, Rowan testified: “He says, ‘This deer looks like this.’ He describes the number of points, what he thinks the deer will score in inches, and how much I should pay if I elect that deer.”
Rowan didn’t respond to a message left at his former company.
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Cattle are no longer king
When it comes to lobbying, Missouri and Indiana aren’t leading the way. If you want a glimpse of what the future might hold, it helps to go to Texas.
The Texas Deer Association’s political action committee has spent at least $645,478 since 2006.
Breeders here can fence in wild animals to hunt and release farm-raised deer into the wild, a practice many states have banned, considering it a disease risk. The state’s 1,226 registered breeders are required to run CWD tests on only 20 percent of the adult animals that die, whereas some other states test 100 percent.
In Texas, no deer have to be routinely tested for bovine tuberculosis.
The rules that do apply are loosely enforced. In a report to lawmakers last year, state wildlife officials noted that two-thirds of all deer breeders were out of compliance with the terms of their one-year permits. The most common reason was incomplete herd inventories. In other words, some of the deer the farmers told the agency they had in their pens vanished without a record.
“In the last two reporting years, deer breeders were unable to explain the disappearance of 1,932 deer previously reported in 83 separate facilities,” officials wrote.
Such poor record keeping would make it impossible to backtrack animals that might have been exposed to diseases.
How did the Texas legislature respond? By relaxing the rules, extending the permit renewals for some farmers to once every five years instead of annually.
Marty Berry, who lobbies on behalf of the Texas Deer Association, boasts that cattle are no longer king in his state: “Deer are king.” And when it comes to deer, he is, too.
“I am the king behind my fence,” said Berry, a deer breeder and preserve owner near Corpus Christi. “These are my deer.”
In essence, that’s the same argument Bellar’s legal team made during the 2005 trial. And it’s making its way to Washington.
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Rusty Camp, one of Bellar’s videographers,
testified that filming the hunts in Bellar’s pens was difficult because it was hard to keep the fences out of the frame.
All of that was later edited out so a hunter could keep his bragging rights. Hunters, Camp testified, also would be required to re-enact certain portions of the hunt.
“A hunt is pretty much done backwards,” he said on the witness stand, describing a method he said was used by cable TV hunting programs.
“So that was kind of tough for the hunter to understand because they would go out and buy these videos and watch them, and then once they’d find out how it’s really done, it kind of turned the tables on the hunting videos.”
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Seeking federal funds, relaxed rules
Last April, 20 deer breeders from 14 states met in the offices of Capitol Hill Consulting Group, a Washington, D.C., lobbying firm.
A summary of the meeting published in Trophy Whitetail World described the legislative agenda of the North American Deer Farmers Association, which has paid Capitol Hill Consulting $638,000 since 2005, according to The Center for Responsive Politics.
The first priority was money. The group and its lobbyists urged lawmakers to support science grants to study deer diseases and to boost funding for a U.S. Department of Agriculture program that pays farmers when deer are slaughtered to be tested for chronic wasting disease. In 2010, the program received more than $16 million, but it was cut to about $1.5 million in 2012. A spending bill signed into law has since boosted that to $3 million, according to the association.
The group also is seeking money to pay deer breeders when their animals die from EHD, a disease caused by biting midges that kills thousands of wild and farmed deer every year.
The breeders met with USDA staffers to express their concerns about proposed nonbinding guidelines to help states set standards to limit the spread of CWD.
In its original guidelines published in 2012, the USDA said states should require all adult animals that die at hunting preserves to be tested for the disease. After complaints from the industry, the latest draft guidelines published late last year relaxed the recommendations, saying that only animals from herds seeking certification to move animals interstate ought to be tested.
What’s more, the latest draft would give states the option of letting breeders ship deer from CWD-infected herds if officials approve the transfer and the deer are moving to areas where CWD is known to exist. The new draft rule might be used to let breeders’ businesses continue should outbreaks occur.
“To me, the question is: Is this still a disease-control program like it was originally intended to be and like it was supposed to be?” said John Fischer, director of the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study.
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In some of the more bizarre videos entered into evidence at Bellar’s trial, Bellar and his employees staged fake hunts by shooting deer with drug-tipped arrows, then posing over the unconscious animals as if they were dead. Fake blood was spattered on the deer, but in some videos, it was clear they were still breathing. Camp, the videographer, testified that he filmed as many as 10 such “hunts” to go in marketing videos used to woo clients.
“What we did was we invented a dart that went on an arrow, and we shot them with an arrow, and we made a movie out of it,” Bellar explained in his recent interview with The Star. “I seen John Wayne get killed at least 20 times in a movie, so we just re-enacted a hunt when we darted those deer.”
The drug Bellar was using was not approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use on deer, because it could harm people who eat the meat. A drug used to wake up the deer was restricted to dogs and cats. Using the drugs would later result in a federal charge.
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The disease and ethical questions raised by the captive-deer industry have been the narrow focus of industry leaders and wildlife advocates as the issue pops up in individual states. Despite the interstate nature of the industry, a broad national discussion has yet to materialize.
Those who have pushed back against the industry on the state level think a national dialogue would help establish standards and limit the risk of disease.
At the top of that agenda for some is the call for an end to interstate traffic in live deer.
“The feds should slam the door and say, ‘Boom, this is done,’ ” said Matt Dunfee, coordinator of the Chronic Wasting Disease Alliance, a group made up of national deer and elk hunting and advocacy groups.
Some also question the wisdom of letting so many preserves operate without basic hunting ground rules.
“There’s opportunities for setting standards and requirements for licensing on private game farms that could potentially be on a national level, so there’s some standards ... to kind of ensure humane care,” said William Karesh, executive vice president for health and policy at EcoHealth Alliance, an international wildlife conservation group.
A couple of laws provide an opportunity to apply rules. Congress could amend the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act to cover cervids, which include deer, elk and moose. Or it could amend the Animal Welfare Act, which regulates the treatment of animals in research, exhibition and transport and by dealers.
“Yes, the public supports fair chase hunting, as long as the meat’s used,” said Jim Miller, professor emeritus at Mississippi State University’s Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Aquaculture. “But I think if the public ever realized all of these things are going on at these captive cervid facilities, they would absolutely abhor any kind of operation like that.”
Added Miller: “I wish we had some type of federal regulation.”
Schafer, executive director of the deer farmers association, says these types of regulations would kill his industry. Under the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, he says, animals can be slaughtered only in specific ways. He said a hunter’s arrow or bullet to a deer’s lungs or heart wouldn’t be allowed.
But this, critics say, is another example of how the captive-deer industry wants to be classified as agriculture, without playing by agriculture’s rules.
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In one film clip shown at Bellar’s trial, a deer is seen staggering and wagging its head as it approaches a hunter inside a wooden ground blind. Wildlife officials said it appeared to be drugged. It comes within a few yards of the hunter, whose rifle is poking out the blind window before he blasts the clumsy deer.
In his interview with The Star, Bellar denied that his clients ever shot drugged animals. He said all deer released into the pens had been administered revival drugs at least 24 hours before.
“Two hours after you give ’em a shot of that and give them the reversal, you know, he’s back on his feet,” Bellar told The Star. “He’s the same as any other deer.”
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Lacey Act in the crosshairs
On their trip to D.C., representatives of the captive-deer industry took one other action worth noting. They had problems with a particular federal law — the Lacey Act.
Under Lacey, a person who violates a state’s poaching laws, which are typically misdemeanors or infractions punishable by fines of a few hundred dollars, can be charged with a felony in federal court if the ill-gotten animal parts cross state lines.
The law was adopted in 1900 to help end the practice of market hunting, the massive killing of wild animals for profit. Market hunters decimated several native species, such as the American bison and the now-extinct passenger pigeon.
Recently, the Lacey Act has been used to prosecute at least a dozen deer smugglers. The deer industry argued the law fails to recognize their deer as livestock. They say it is misapplied to deer farmers and high-fence hunting preserves.
They told lawmakers and federal officials they wanted to be exempt from Lacey, the law under which Bellar was charged, the one that brought the hunting practices at Bellar’s Place to an abrupt end.
“These here was home-grown animals,” Bellar told The Star. “Like I said, we pay taxes on ’em. I still to today don’t understand how that they get us under the Lacey Act with animals that we own and pay taxes on.”
But — given concerns about disease and ethical hunting practices — does this hobby-turned-multibillion-dollar industry really need less regulation?
http://www.mansfieldnewsjournal.com/...ers-make-rules
There are several other articles on the topic, if you are interested, at http://www.mansfieldnewsjournal.com/section/NEWS01