They Shoot Zebras, Don't They?
These days, you don't have to go to the African veldt to hunt gazelle, kudu and zebra. Set your sights on Texas
By Joshua Kurlantzick
Sunday, February 6, 2005; Page W21
As the men bumped away from camp in the four-wheel-drive pickup, over rutted dirt roads and through tiny streams, the sun revealed open plains around them, dotted with scrawny oak trees. Paul Tyjewski, Paul Royce and their guide, Kal Katzer, began glimpsing exotic wildlife gathering under the trees, using the cover of daybreak to feed before predators arose. Only, in this instance, the animals' instincts had failed them, since the predators were wide-eyed, eager and getting ever closer with their 7mm Remingtons. In one area, skittish kudu, African antelopes with twisting horns rising two feet out of their skulls, hopped from tree to tree. Nearby, aoudads -- massive versions of sheep from the Barbary rocks of North Africa, with horns curving out and back from their skulls -- playfully butted heads. Katzer pointed out ibex, exotic goats with thick, scaly horns.
Seeing these graceful animals in their native Africa has its own power. But the fact that the group was taking them in -- and hunting them -- near Junction, Tex., only two hours from urban San Antonio, made the moment even more remarkable.
Katzer stopped the pickup in a meadow bisected by an oval patch of water. Near here, at dusk the previous day, another hunter had gotten a clear shot at a large aoudad, mortally wounding the animal. Katzer then butchered the aoudad; the meat went back to the ranch, and the horns went to the hunter, to take home in his luggage.
Katzer cut the engine. Having traversed the surrounding area hundreds of times, he decided that this was the best spot for the hunters to shoot. He dropped off Tyjewski at a ground blind, a concealed hut with a slot for a gun, then helped Royce up into a tower blind -- a high structure like a prison guard tower, painted in green-and-gray camouflage, big enough for two chairs and with a narrow slot in its sides to place a gun. Once inside, Royce sat down and waited.
An hour later, no animals had wandered up to the watering hole. Nearly two hours later, still nothing. Then, suddenly, a minor rush. A silvery-brown white-tailed doe, nervously munching grass, emerged out of the low brush across from the blind, still partly concealed by vegetation. In the woods, behind the doe, Royce glimpsed through his owlish glasses a small group of other animals he couldn't immediately identify. He sucked in his breath.
In his claustrophobic blind, Royce had barely moved for two hours. Now, as his prey emerged into sight, several hundred yards from the blind, he slowly raised his rifle as he'd done countless times before, his movement almost imperceptible -- but not to the animals. Each time Royce twitched, the animals skittered off a few feet, threatening to vanish. Still gripping his Remington, he tried to be even quieter.
Now the doe grew less skittish, and Royce focused more intensely. But before he could figure out a shot, the animal put her head up and backtracked, moving closer to the edge of the brush, so a clear shot wasn't possible. For the next hour, Royce never got another chance to shoot, but he didn't seem particularly discouraged. "Listen to the woods," Royce said. "That's a pleasure -- hear the bugle of sika in the distance. It's always so loud just before it gets dark."
The reverie was broken by the sound of Katzer's truck. It was now past 8 o'clock. Tyjewski was already in the vehicle; after spending nearly four hours sitting in his blind, he hadn't gotten any animals, either. He sat slumped, his body slack. Katzer shined a light out the driver's side window, reflecting the beam on the eyes of ibex, sika deer and other animals under the cover of darkness.
Back at camp, the men wandered into the long dining hall. Royce was looking for a bite to eat and a glass of wine before collapsing into bed. But Tyjewski wasn't ready to hit the sack yet. Instead of the dining hall, he walked into the camp lodge's main living room: a long, narrow space with comfortable sofas, a nearby billiards room and walls covered in African animal heads -- kudu, aoudad, wildebeest, antelope, scimitar-horned oryx. He had just experienced the thrilling rush of a pseudo-safari -- the stunning game, the wild setting, the tense waiting of a hunt. But in this strange parallel universe of heartland Texas, he plopped down into the couch, aimed the remote toward the television and scanned ESPN2 for college football highlights.
ONCE UPON A TIME, a safari was a uniquely African adventure, beyond the means of most Americans. A safari meant stalking animals on the broad Serengeti plain alongside regal Masai guides, camping in bush huts near streams full of hippos, waking up in a remote place to the rhythms of Africa. These days, however, an African adventure can be as manageable as a visit to an American national park.
Royce and Tyjewski had come from Michigan to the Rio Bonito Ranch -- a luxurious 25-square-mile property in the Texas Hill Country -- to hunt exotic sheep, deer and goats. Rio Bonito is one of hundreds of similar operations in Texas, some of which offer opportunities to bag or buy such unusual prey as Russian boars, nilgais, barasinghas, oryx, zebras, giraffes and wildebeests. Rio Bonito is surrounded by four-foot fences, with eight-foot fences in some interior pastures. The dry climate and scrubby flora of the Hill Country, a 15,000-square-mile area in south-central Texas, might indeed resemble remotest Africa. Just like Africa, Rio Bonito Ranch offers up-close encounters with wild game. But in a typically American more-is-better fashion, Rio Bonito goes further than Africa in some ways: Hunters can also shoot Asian animals such as the speedy black buck antelope from India, so fast it can top 50 mph, European animals such as the Corsican sheep, and American animals such as the Texas white-tailed deer.
More than 50 years ago, pioneering Texas ranchers began importing species from Africa to keep on their property, breed and occasionally allow hunters to shoot. As real estate boomed and ranchers sold off more property, more people got into the exotic ranching business. In 1997 the Texas legislature let expire Texas Parks and Wildlife's oversight over nonnative animals, turning any regulation over the practice to the localities. Some Texans, including local animal rights groups, objected forcefully, but they had limited effectiveness in a state devoted to property rights -- especially in the late 1990s, when ranchers were struggling through years of drought.
As long as the species were not endangered, the federal government seemed to have limited ability or inclination to regulate the ranches. "It's just not our priority here," said Gary Young, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife agent in Texas. "Unless there's a big problem with exotics reported to us, we don't seek out regulation." According to U.S. Fish and Wildlife records requested under the Freedom of Information Act, only a handful of investigations have been launched into the killing of exotic endangered species on Texas ranches in recent years. (The animals Rio Bonito carries are not endangered.) One case involved a guar, a massive endangered ox native to Southeast Asia; the head turned up at a local taxidermist, which prompted the Fish and Wildlife probe.
Some investigations, such as the guar case, appear to involve claims that the animals shot on site were "hybrids" -- animals that had been crossbred in captivity with other species. "Hybrids" generally aren't covered by endangered species laws. In the guar investigation, Fish and Wildlife found that the hunters knew guars were endangered but had made an arrangement that "they would come to Texas and hunt guar . . . if [redacted] would write a statement that the guar . . . were hybrids." The case was closed after the primary subject of the investigation died. Fish and Wildlife documents also revealed that at another ranch, staff members apparently used dart guns to tranquilize animals, then herded them toward hunters for the kill. Because the tranquilizer was considered an illegal substance to administer, one individual was charged and pleaded guilty, receiving 90 days' home detention, three years' probation and a $1,000 fine.
But for ranchers, potential legal problems pale in comparison to economic benefits.
"Exotics have kept ranchers from losing their property," said Charly Seale, executive director of the Exotic Wildlife Association, the exotic ranches' trade group. Sitting in his office, a low-slung building down the road from Rio Bonito, his walls covered with heads of animals from across Africa and Asia, Seale certainly looked ready for a safari, with a handsome salt-and-pepper beard, a tan cowboy hat and high leather boots. Seale estimated that there are more than 200,000 exotic animals from nearly 70 species in Texas, spread out over more than 1,000 operators. (There are also ranches in states such as Florida and Maine, but Texas has by far the most.) Several decades ago, there were only a handful of these ranches in Texas, Seale said. That industry, Seale said, now brings in more than $120 million in annual revenue. On the Internet, these "Texotics" operations can advertise to hunters all over the country, offering them more convenience and lower rates than African operators.
Many exotics ranchers and hunters also believe that they are helping save species; Seale said the ranches place a monetary value on the animals, and by making them valuable they contribute to their conservation. According to Brian Child, an expert on wildlife conservation who worked for more than a decade for Zimbabwe's Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management, when villagers in places such as Zimbabwe were given the right to own and sell animals, they valued them highly -- refusing to help poachers kill them -- and used them wisely, sell-ing the hunting rights for high prices and plowing the money back into conservation. Indeed, Seale said, one argument for Texotics is that some Texas ranchers could reintroduce African species to places in Africa where they have died off, and several Texas ranchers have been trying to do so.
Still, the blossoming industry has raised the ire of animal rights activists. "We're not interested in reform [of fenced-in hunting]," said Wayne Pacelle, chief executive of the Humane Society of the United States, the country's largest animal protection organization. Fenced-in hunting "is basically, in our view, an unethical proposition, even by the norms of the hunting industry." In fact, some opponents object as much to the hunting of farm-raised animals released just for hunters, often behind fences, as they do to the use of exotic animals. When Vice President Cheney participated in a hunt for farm-raised pheasants on a private game ranch in late 2003, he was quickly denounced by animal rights activists. But, according to Jan Dizard, a professor of sociology and American studies at Amherst College and author of Going Wild: Hunting, Animal Rights, and the Contested Meaning of Nature, few hunting groups actively work to ban hunting in preserves with fences, fearing that might simply encourage animal rights activists to target all types of hunting.
Over the past decade, members of Congress have proposed several versions of a bill that would ban trophy hunting of nonnative species in enclosures smaller than 1,000 acres. The 2004 bill did not make it out of committee.
Many Texas exotics owners see animal rights activists as trying to deprive ranchers of their livelihood. The exotics owners, with the backing of the Safari Club International, a group dedicated to exotic hunting, have won many battles in the past. "These animals belong to me. I should be able to do with them what I want," Seale said. "The government just shouldn't be telling us what we can and can't do with them."
ROYCE HAD BEEN TO AFRICA 10 times, and, though he admired Rio Bonito's landscape and habitat, he was more nonchalant about the end result of this hunt. "If I get an animal, that's great -- if not, okay . . . It's the total experience that matters," he said. "I grew up on a farm, with not much money, but close to nature . . . One of the things hunting does for me is it allows me to get away from the tour bus and the path and back to the woods."
After Africa, Rio Bonito might have seemed a comedown for Royce. Sitting in a hunting blind, he said, "When I bush hunt in Africa, I get antelope, kudu, impala, buffalo, even leopard. I'd save for years to get the money to [shoot] a buffalo there." Still, he said, "Africa's getting harder . . . Since 9/11 it's become almost impossible for hunters to bring their own guns there. The red tape is getting enormous. You get there and they charge you more and more, and you arrive at immigration and they have one person there to deal with a whole planeful of hunters, and you wait there for hours just to get in [to a country]." He sighed. "I've almost given up [gun] hunting there. Last time, I just said, 'I'll just pack a bow and bow hunt,' because at least you can get a bow through customs."
Tyjewski had never been to Africa, and the wealth of animals at Rio Bonito disoriented him at first. "I'd see a sika and wonder, 'What was that?'" One afternoon, after a typically large meal, Katzer loaded the truck, and we rumbled away from the lodge. Tyjewski's wife, Phyllis, was along for the ride, on her first hunting trip, and oohed and aahed over the large, regal aoudads. Katzer seemed determined to find animals for Royce and Tyjewski to shoot this time out.
"You'll definitely see what you want," he called back to them, scanning the horizon for game. "Tons of animals have been gathering." He soon came to a stop, poring over a makeshift map and a stars/moon chart, a complex diagram designed to use the phases of the moon to predict where animals will move.
After an hour's drive, Katzer dropped us off in ground blinds. We settled into the tiny enclosures, several hundred yards from pastures dominated by large mechanical feeders, which occasionally whirred and groaned as they scattered helpings of corn on the ground to lure game out of the brush. Royce sat down, uncapped a small bottle of water so as not to make any noise later, and delicately unpacked his Remington and scope, loading the rifle with long, gold bullets the size of a child's finger. He stuck the gun out of the blind.
For hours, no animals arrived, and Royce and I sat crammed into the tiny blind, speaking in whispers. "When I've taken young kids out hunting, at first for them it's all about the gun, about what we're going to get," he said. "But we go out once, twice, three times, they realize it's hard -- stalking, barely moving, maybe not seeing anything. They either get the whole experience and love it, or they don't." I asked whether the same idea applied to hunting at Rio Bonito -- that the experience was as important as the take. Royce paused.
This place is so large that you're not guaranteed to get anything, he said, so it's the experience that counts here, too.
Finally, before dusk, a splotch of white and brown poked out of the brush near a feeder. It inched closer, closer to the corn, until we saw the full body of a white-tailed deer. Behind her, just off to the right, a buck and several exotic animals -- likely sika or aoudads -- waited in the cover of the scrubby woods. The doe may have seen us. She moved two or three steps toward the feeder and then reared up, as if trying to catch sight of a predator moving in the grass -- but still not exposed enough for a clean shot. She did this twice, five times, 10 times, nervously glancing around. "Makes you think -- who has the advantage?" Royce wondered. "Me, with a high-powered rifle and a scope, or an animal with almost perfect hearing who can tell everything I'm doing?"
Eventually, the doe moved closer to the feeder and began to eat, still obscured by brush. But as dusk approached, no other animals came out from their cover. Royce disassembled his gun as he admired the sunset. He stared out the gun slot, and we both listened to an owl cooing.
As night fell, we heard the safari pickup in the distance, and soon Katzer appeared, with Tyjewski in the back seat. "Did you [get] anything?" he asked. Royce said he hadn't. Then they headed back, talking little, as the roar of the truck's motor pierced the otherwise tranquil Texas night.
WHEN WE RETURNED TO THE LODGE, standing outside the front entrance was a slender, grandmotherly woman with a mane of tangled white-blond hair and a broad, warm smile. This was Gwen Hughes, owner of the ranch. She was wearing faded jeans, gold hoop earrings and a collared shirt with a logo of an animal caught in a bull's-eye. With her clients empty-handed, Hughes seemed worried. "Ohhh, you didn't see anything," she said. "Nothing?"
Hughes quickly pulled out her own moon/stars guide, designed by her father, a lifelong hunter. Hughes spun its series of dials, plumbing the guide to determine the best places and times to send Royce and Tyjewski out. She called over to Katzer. "Tomorrow, the south pasture -- they will go there," she said, firmly. "Tomorrow, for sure . . . Hopefully when you come back tomorrow someone will have gotten a nice big aoudad."
Hughes came late to Texotics. She was born into a Florida family that cherished hunting. "I'm from Orlando from before it was Disney World, when it was just ranches," she told me, over plates of aoudad cooked chicken-fried-steak style. Her father would "show me and my sister filing cabinets full of his calculations about game . . . He studied where the Earth was on its axis, its phases of the moon" to learn the best times for hunting.
Hughes spent a decade working as an educator and administrator in southern Virginia and raising her two sons before returning to Florida in 1994, after her father died of a heart attack. Inspired by their father's love for the outdoors, Hughes and her sister considered buying a ranch.
But by 1994, Orlando was full of theme parks, so Hughes moved to Texas, where land was cheaper. She met a caretaker of Rio Bonito, which in 1995 was in disrepair. When the caretaker was suddenly killed in a plane crash several months later, Hughes, though upset, believed it was a sign: "I was inspired, you know?" She relocated to the Hill Country, decided to obtain the Rio Bonito land. Hughes started researching exotic breeds and began building an inventory. The rarer animals, kudu bulls or dama gazelles or Afghan urial sheep, go as high as $5,000 or more each, and then cost thousands of dollars to feed over the course of their lives. Still, Hughes plunged in, and now has 16 species of game on site, including sika, fallow deer, Russian boars, ibex, Corsican sheep and aoudads. Sometimes, guests want to hunt species that she doesn't have, such as zebra or wildebeest, but Hughes could bring them in. "I could try to find zebra," she said, "but I haven't done it for them because zebra are very strong, strong-headed, and they can run right through a fence." Still, she said, "other ranches in the area do zebra -- it's economic for them, and they're able to keep them inside the fences. There is a very large interest in [hunting] zebra."
And unlike in Africa or Asia, where these animals roam wild, at the Texas Hill Country operations such as Rio Bonito, the animals have to be raised, coddled and catered to. So Hughes has built a kind of small exotic animal nursery and breeding area on site.
Though there are fences around her property, Hughes doesn't see her ranch as any different than the kind of hunting she grew up on, since the animals range across the property. "We have so much land here, that you'll see it makes it tough to hunt," she said.
The morning after Royce and Tyjewski's first hunt, Hughes was barreling around the ranch in her truck, her sleeves rolled up, exposing her ropy, long arm muscles. She had been up since almost 4:30 a.m., scouting out areas where her animals might be gathering. Though her guides are plenty experienced, Hughes has a more intrinsic knowledge of the land.
After tucking into breakfast, Hughes attended to the other half of her enterprise: the hunters' families. Since so many ranchers in Texas had the same idea of going into exotics, Hughes needed a niche. "We made it into a family ranch, a place where a guy and his wife could come on a hunt, or a mother-daughter team," she said. "Nothing brings a family together better than being outdoors and taking animals." In the dining hall, Hughes proudly pointed out photos of girls posing alongside heads of animals -- an 11-year-old who'd shot a chocolate fallow; a teenager dressed in camouflage, holding a high-powered rifle and standing next to an oryx.
In the late afternoon, when the hunters started to wander toward the dining hall, the staff pushed axis deer meat that some of the wives had helped cook earlier in the day onto plates alongside potatoes and Southern greens. Hughes sat down next to one of her sons, who works as a guide, and the guests settled in for the feast. Heads went down, a moment of silence, and the eating commenced. A father-and-son team of hunters from Arkansas, who'd never been to Africa, talked about the sika they'd taken down the previous evening. "I didn't know what it was -- I never saw anything like it before," said the son, a twenty-something with short, bristly hair. But he had bagged it, and now he had a story to take home.
Deep in the Hill Country, at a village named Harper, half an hour from the Rio Bonito ranch, hundreds of locals in jeans and camouflage passed through the gate and into Raz Livestock's monthly auction, one of many exotics sales in Texas. Before the auction started, potential bidders inspected the animals. Squeezing along a narrow catwalk slung above the animals, inside a massive shed, ranchers stared down into the pens of menageries from around the world -- wildebeests and water buffaloes slowly turning in circles, emus flapping their wings, packs of zebras butting their heads into pen walls, wild Siberian boars rooting around on the ground. Potential bidders had to register at an office outside; near the registry, local taxidermists advertised their services.
Staring down into a zebra pen, I bumped into Charly Seale, executive director of the Exotic Wildlife Association, and his wife, Carolyn, a former model who now runs hair salons. "The exotic meats are so much better for you -- they're lower in cholesterol than store-bought meat," she said. "If more people ate exotic meats, cancer rates would definitely go down."
After selling traditional Texas cattle, the auctioneer began screaming out bids on the exotics. One by one, animal handlers brought the animals into a semi-circular enclosure covered in metal bars, surrounded by a tin-roofed amphitheater adorned with desiccated animal skulls, where more than 150 bidders were packed in on folding chairs and bleachers. Occasionally, one of the sellers would poke a cane through the wire at an overly placid animal of his, trying to spark it to life so it would get higher bids.
Sitting in a booth directly above the enclosure, the auctioneer hollered as handlers dragged out a young kudu with thin horns. The price climbed quickly. Finally, the kudu bull went for nearly $2,000. The animal handlers grabbed the kudu by the horns, pushed it back toward the pens and brought out the next kudu. "It's a long afternoon," said one man in the crowd. "Let's go get a burger."
On their last afternoon at Rio Bonito, Royce and Tyjewski were the only hunters left, and they hadn't taken a shot, so Hughes decided to let them stalk. Stalking is a difficult proposition because the animals can hear nearly all movement around them, and because it requires considerable physical exertion. Still, Royce welcomed the new approach. "Nothing is like stalking," he said. "I'll crawl on my belly, inch by inch, for three hours, to go a few hundred feet and get close to the animal. All my muscles tense, and my senses are so aware."
Dressed in camouflage, their guns ready, the two hunters and Katzer moved slowly through a patch of partly open scrub, almost tiptoeing to the cover of small oak trees, where they could hide themselves. Underneath the trees, Texas dall sheep, sika bucks, African axis deer and Corsican sheep were gathering. The men moved closer, darting from tree to tree. Finally, they got close enough to see the animals clearly. But no one took a shot. "None of them really interested me -- they're just medium-sized," Royce said later, of the animals with smaller horns, which wouldn't be very impressive mounted.
Night began to fall. Just before dark, Royce glimpsed the markings of a large sika buck, but he couldn't see the animal's entire torso. He waited. It got darker. He waited some more. There was still no clear view of the buck's torso. The sky turned nearly black. "He wasn't presenting himself in a way I could take a clean shot," Royce said. One final time, he packed up his gun.
Tyjewski, though, held out some hope. He returned to a tree blind and waited again. Two and a half hours later, a large dall sheep, with a full curl of horns, came into plain view, the first large animal he'd gotten a clear look at. He quickly raised his gun and fired. The bullet smacked into the animal, and it turned, confused, toward Tyjewski and began to move toward the tree blind. He fired again. "The second shot just finished the animal," Tyjewski said. The dall fell to the ground, and a guide skinned it for him. Tyjewski then handed it over to a local taxidermist to mount the head for him. He is expecting the head to arrive sometime in the summer.
Joshua Kurlantzick is foreign editor of the New Republic.
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