Fieldwork Report
Lessons learned through my interview of the Robinson Ranch and its owner
Did you know you could receive up to a $1000 reward for information that leads to the arrest and conviction for a wildlife crime in Texas? Operation Game thief is just one of the many ways Texas Parks and Wildlife is actively combatting poaching. It is not very often you see a poaching incident hit headlines in Texas or even the United states for that matter. Nonetheless, it is a very real issue both here at home and the world over. I used this field report to gain insight as to cultural opinions regarding the issue. I wanted to ask questions such as: What do people think about poaching? What do they think the causes are? What do they know or think about efforts to defeat poaching? I wanted to talk about poaching in the United States vs poaching in Africa. To answer these questions, I needed to talk to people. I decided to interview a friend of mine familiar with the hunting and conservation world because he would have more insight to offer on the situation.
I hopped on facetime with an old roommate and friend of mine for an interview concerning poaching. I chose William because he is an experienced hunter and outdoorsman. He has been employed as a guide on ranches across south Texas and Montana and is currently working at a lodge in Alaska. He is the son of the owner of the ranch I used for my later interview of a place. As I listened to William, I learned a few things. Mainly, poaching is a very broad term. The most common thought when someone brings up poaching the focus tends to be around Africa and the illegal ivory trade. That is where the egregious acts are occurring including violence. Poaching here in Texas takes a much different form. Texas is 99% privately owned. There is not a tremendous amount of “wild” left. From my experience as well as William’s, most landowners are fairly protective of their property and everything on it. Landowners are usually the first line of defense against poaching here in Texas. Landowners who hunt are always especially willing to catch any criminals. With a strong infrastructure, Texas parks and wildlife is well equipped to fight wildlife crime, therefore you don’t see poaching like you do in Africa. It is an effective way to combat the issue and it works well here. That is why you don’t see poaching making the headlines very often in Texas.
Poaching still occurs in Texas according to William, but it takes the form of what he calls “unethical hunting.” All of the poaching instances he was familiar with related to hunters who used poor judgement and decided to harvest an animal (usually a whitetail deer) outside of legal hunting season or outside of legal hunting hours i.e., at night. The hunter’s intentions may not have been malignant, however, they committed the crime of poaching nonetheless. In Texas, that crime is usually met with hefty fines, probation periods, license suspensions, etc. Extreme cases will be met with Jail time. According to William, a hunter’s worst fear is not being able to hunt again. Therefore, when I asked him about potential causes or motives of poachers in Texas, he shook his head. He assumes most of the time it was just poor judgement by an uneducated hunter or alcohol along with more poor judgement was involved.
From my interview, I never got the sense that William viewed hunting as a tremendous issue here in Texas. Overseas was a completely different matter. Although not as knowledgeable about overseas hunting, Williams late grandfather was a professional hunter in Africa for over a decade. Professional hunters generally serve as guides on various types of game hunts. They take clients on potentially dangerous hunts on officially designated land in the African wild. He remembers vaguely stories his grandfather told him of poachers and how dangerous they could be. Many encounters with poachers could and would result in bloodshed. When I asked him about causes, he said most likely that it had to do with money. Nixon describes the poor and impoverished community as the ones to suffer the worst environmental atrocities. Poaching offered a chance to make big money fast. In a poor community those types of opportunities are going to get taken advantage of because of necessity.
As we concluded I reflected on how vast an issue poaching was. It takes so many shapes and forms, and the line can get murky at times. The biggest issue here in Texas seems to be people being uneducated on the laws and regulations concerning wild game, whereas the issue faced on the other side of the Atlantic may have a much more complex origin. I thanked William for the call before getting into my car to go to his ranch without him for the first time.
I wondered what I might see as I stepped out of my car onto the caliche covered road. I reminded myself I was not looking for specifics but was here to explore a series of questions. I stood there on the ranch road in McNeil, Texas, a small unincorporated community located almost within Austin’s city limits. This was not my first time to the Robinson ranch; in fact, I had probably been at least a hundred times before. However, it was my first time here to conduct an interview with something that could not talk back. I wanted to look at the relationship between human and the environment around us and whether there were examples of harmony between the two. I figured this would be a perfect spot considering it is around 8000 acres of undeveloped land surrounded by neighborhoods, schools, industrial sites. It is a combination of urban development and Texas hill country. What I found was slow violence.
The sun was low in the sky as I got to the specific place I had decided for my interview. It was a large pasture on the edge of the property. I chose somewhere on the edge of the property because that was where nature met civilization so to speak. Highway 45 and Mopac border the pasture as cars speed by which left a constant noisiness lingering in the air. There were buildings being built on the edges of the property. Tall apartments and warehouses were under construction next to a herd of cows that paid no mind to it. A couple of horse grazed nearby as well. This is what I came to interview. It had been 4 years since I first stepped foot on the Robinson ranch. There were parts of the ranch I was looking at that I could no longer explore because they it had been developed into various projects like apartments or gas stations. This tiny corner of the property still held a great amount of beauty but it was shrinking. I tried to imagine what it looked like before all the roads and the buildings. I think it was a perfect depiction of what Nixon describes as slow violence. The animals don’t know what is occurring around them. Gradually the environment around them is being uprooted and developed. The Robinson is surrounded on all sides by urban development and eventually piece by piece it will get developed until there is nothing left. All of the wildlife that currently lives here will eventually be wiped out due to the land being developed. I hope William and their family can preserve it as long as possible but time will tell.
Ultimately, I learned a great deal through these interactions. My field work gave me a broader perspective on my issues. I understand poaching is a problem all over the world but I like to think there is hope. Poaching is largely not a major issue in Texas due to the work done by TPWD and hunters committed to stopping it. However, habitat loss is a completely different story. Regardless, what works here may not work on a game reserve in Africa where there is much less private land and law enforcement. People do not seem to be concerned with poaching. I had guessed this would be a result of my fieldwork beforehand. The real problem is too far away for the greater population here to be concerned. The questions I came into these interviews with have lead me to new questions to further my pursuit of becoming rhetorical. There are many more aspects of slow violence that can be directly attributed to poaching I would like to investigate. I want to dive more into the causes contributing to poaching than the crime itself.
