‘Ghost Deer’ Busts Expose Glaring Hole In Texas Law
Smugglers face small fines for trafficking deer to game ranches in the midst of a chronic wasting disease outbreak.
On March 9 of last year, Game Warden Coty Castro watched a white F-350 with a trailer pass by in the East Texas town of Willis. He pulled the truck over for an expired registration, but had received a tip that the men inside planned to traffic live whitetail deer, according to court records obtained by Public Domain.
Castro asked the two men in the car what was in the trailer. The man in the passenger seat, 46-year-old Herbert McKinzie Jr., said he and the driver had just dropped off a load of donkeys and the trailer was empty. Castro peaked inside and saw a young whitetail buck.
A search of the truck and trailer turned up seven whitetails that the pair said they had shot with tranquilizer darts, along with nine different drugs for which they lacked prescriptions, and a handgun.
A judge convicted the men five months ago on more than 50 counts of deer-related crimes, including unauthorized possession of live whitetail deer, moving captive deer without a license and failure to conduct a live test for chronic wasting disease, or CWD — a contagious neurological disorder that wildlife biologists widely view as the single-greatest threat to the country’s deer herds.
But in Texas, those charges are low-level misdemeanors. McKinzie paid a total of $5,800 in fines for the deer violations. The driver, whose name Public Domain is not disclosing because he was 17 years old at the time of his arrest, paid $5,050. The crimes were not serious enough under Texas law to revoke or suspend the men’s hunting privileges. The court returned valuable items collected as evidence, including a pair of rangefinding Swarovski binoculars and the trailer.
The grand total of $1,550 in fines per deer trafficked pales in comparison to the animal's market value in a state dotted with game ranches stocked with pen-raised deer, where a high-scoring buck can fetch prices topping $20,000. Texas Parks and Wildlife Department says the two men illegally moved the deer from an East Texas breeding operation and planned to release them onto game ranches for paying hunters to shoot. McKinzie is a licensed deer breeder from South Texas, according to TPWD.
A few weeks after announcing the convictions, wildlife officials said a broader investigation based on the Montgomery County case had unearthed a network of so-called "ghost deer" traffickers shuttling animals across Texas in violation of the law and state CWD containment measures. Prosecutors have filed approximately 1,200 charges against 22 suspects in those cases, including several felonies.
The widespread deer-smuggling busts, which TPWD made public last month, have raised major concerns among conservationists that state laws are too weak to hold bad actors in check. Texas has long classified poaching big game as a serious offense, but the two men in the Montgomery County case didn’t kill any animals.
"That's just a slap on the wrist," said Justin Dreibelbis, the chief executive officer of the Texas Wildlife Association. "If there's no disincentive to doing that stuff, they're going to keep doing it."
The legal conundrum leaves a glaring hole in the state’s effort to contain an unexplained outbreak of CWD that has appeared in more than two dozen captive breeder pens over the last five years. The state has responded by killing off entire captive herds when they become infected, establishing containment zones around infection sites and restricting movement of exposed deer. But wildlife officials view unregulated deer movement as a major liability in their ongoing efforts to shield free-ranging deer from the outbreak popping up in breeder pens.
It was ultimately the gun and drug violations that allowed the state to charge the deer traffickers in Montgomery County with serious crimes. Prosecutors charged them with a felony for possession of a handgun while committing prescription drug fraud, but the court ultimately dismissed that charge. McKinzie pled guilty on Oct. 23 to possession without a prescription of two of the nine drugs — a synthetic corticosteroid called dexamethasone sodium phosphate and an antibiotic called Draxxin.
McKinzie received a one-year jail sentence that was suspended pending two years of community supervision. The court dismissed the gun charge against the driver. The state destroyed the firearm. The men’s attorneys did not return calls from Public Domain seeking comment.
State Sen. Charles Perry, a Republican from Lubbock, proposed a bill this month to target ghost deer trafficking. Senate Bill 2844 would raise the penalties for illegally importing, capturing or possessing deer to Class B misdemeanors, punishable by up to $2,000 in fines and up to six months in jail.
Transferring a captive deer without an identification number would become a Class A misdemeanor, along with the crimes of moving deer in violation of CWD containment rules. Class A misdemeanors impose fines up to $4,000 and the possibility of up to a year in jail. Repeatedly falsifying CWD samples would become a state felony.
The bill has the support of the Texas Deer Association, which represents the interests of deer breeders. “TDA does not condone any of the illegal activity cited in the ‘ghost deer’ investigation and hopes that passage of SB2844 will help eliminate this type of activity,” Chris Paddie, the group’s executive director, wrote to Public Domain in an email.
The wider network of ghost deer traffickers allegedly trapped wild whitetails to replace dead breeder deer and used poached deer to submit false CWD tests to the state. At least three permitted breeding facilities and 10 release sites were involved, along with facilities operating outside the law.
"These individuals and ranches operated with impunity, repeatedly violating established laws designed to protect Texas’ natural resources and safeguard the state’s wildlife against disease transmission," TPWD Law Enforcement Director Col. Ronald VanderRoest said in a press statement. "Systematic abuse of the regulatory framework governing the deer breeding industry will not be tolerated as we focus on our mission of conservation law enforcement."
The state's captive breeding industry commands significant profits, but serves a small fraction of hunters. Breeders raised an estimated 103,000 deer in the 2022-23 season, while the number of wild deer topped 5 million, according to a study by Texas A&M University. Only about 5 percent of landowners stocked pen-raised deer on their game ranches.