Sometime on the night of Aug. 29, several men shot a bull elk by spotlight without a tag and took the head and antlers, leaving most of the animal to waste near Pearson Ranch in Lincoln County.
It’s the kind of crime that infuriates hunters who often wait for years, even a decade or more, for a coveted bull elk tag. By happenstance, the landowner where the crime was committed caught a blurry, grainy image of the poachers on a trail camera.
The image helped game wardens understand the crime, but they were still unable to identify the people involved. Somewhere, an honest person, probably a sportsman, knows who did it.
Game Warden John Anderson, stationed in Lincoln County, is hard at work trying to solve the case, but he needs just the smallest break — some seemingly insignificant piece of information — to bring all the pieces together. He needs the help of the sporting public.
Solving a big game poaching case takes time, effort and more than a little luck. Think of poaching as a crime similar in scope and evidence to a murder. Could you image how hard it would be to solve a murder in the middle of the desert on a moonless night with no witnesses?
When game wardens discover a dead animal in the wild, even the process of discovering what happened is complicated. The animal could have been eaten by coyotes. Even if a game warden finds a bullet in a carcass it may have not been what killed the animal.
The first step after an animal has been discovered is for the wardens to conduct a “necropsy” — that is an autopsy for animals. Far from using a brightly lit table with surgical instruments like on television, game wardens most often conduct the necropsy on the spot where the animal was found, often using field knives and a flashlight.
Think of how many animals are killed by natural causes, a puncture wound from fighting another buck for example, and you begin to see the real complexity of investigating just one of the dozens of suspicious animals NDOW discovers every year.
With the proliferation of crime dramas, like CSI (and its many offshoots), Law and Order and many others, people have developed a false impression of the ability of law enforcement to solve crimes of all kinds without witnesses or information.
Thinking about poaching in the context of other crimes shows you just how hard it can be. Game wardens and other types of law enforcement officers don’t need an eye witness per se, but they do need information.
That’s where sportsmen come into the picture. Any small piece of information (no matter how trivial it seems at the moment) can crack a case. According to Chief Game Warden Tyler Turnipseed, the best piece of information a person can provide to game wardens is a license plate, but any piece of information can help, including things like descriptions of vehicles, numbers of people, times and dates.
“Our game wardens are some of the smartest and most professional law enforcement people working today,” said Turnipseed. “But too often we can’t solve these crimes for a lack of evidence. We need the public and sportsmen’s help to protect Nevada’s wildlife.”
Sportsmen and women spend a lot of time in the outdoors, and they understand the movements of wildlife and the intricate patterns of hunting season.
The sporting public knows when something doesn’t look right. Sportsmen have a vested interest in stopping poachers for two big reasons: poachers exploit sportsmen by hiding among them and poachers take valuable wildlife resources that either should not be taken or that would otherwise be available for honest sportsmen who wait for a tag.
Game Warden Anderson is still trying to solve the elk poaching from Lincoln County. He has no witnesses, a dead, half rotted elk and one blurry, washed out photograph. He needs more.
If you know something, call Operation Game Thief at 1-(800) 992-3030. Sportsmen are often the critical component to solving or not solving a wildlife crime.
Poachers and other criminals are not hunters. They are criminals, but are too often confused with hunters, and that’s a big mistake. Hunters are the solution, not the problem.
