Part one of two

The 7-foot-high gates of Hillside Game Ranch clang shut, and Scott Beede fumbles with a rusty latch.

Outside the miles of wire fencing, pulp trucks speed along Route 9 in Aurora between Calais and Brewer. Inside, a menagerie of wild boar, pure white fallow deer, red stags and an occasional buffalo transform a swampy cedar forest into a 21st century peaceable kingdom.

Pay Beede’s price, and he’ll let you – and your gun – into paradise.

After a dozen years spent running the largest of Maine’s 10 legal hunting ranches, Beede believes that Hillside represents the natural evolution of the sport in a nation with little accessible wilderness.

“This is the future,” Beede said, surveying the 400 acres where he makes his living transforming bankers and businessmen into weekend warriors.

Hunting ranches – enclosures where trophy animals are raised to be shot – have become a multibillion-dollar business in America. Thousands of ranches have sprung up offering everything from antelopes to zebras.

In response, a passionate opposition led by animal rights organizations such as the Humane Society of the United States has emerged to fight what they refer to as “canned hunts.”

“It’s a theme park environment in which the prize is a dead animal,” said Robert Fisk of Falmouth, director of Maine Friends of Animals. “They’re raising these animals domestically, then using them as targets in a shooting range.”

Horrific scenes of tigers chained in tiny enclosures, or tame deer being shot while they graze on hay have been

featured in the national media, and lawmakers have been watching.

Ten states have banned hunting ranches completely, while others, such as Maine, have passed laws to regulate the practice.

Now, U.S. Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., has proposed a bill, called the Captive Exotic Animal Protection Act, that would halt the interstate transport of exotic trophy animals, essentially putting the hunting ranch industry out of business.

U.S. Rep. John Baldacci supports the legislation.

“Hunting and fishing in the woods and waters of Maine have a long and storied tradition,” said the Maine Democrat and gubernatorial candidate. “It seems to me that any Mainer familiar with the outdoors would realize that canned hunts are not only unfair but not sporting.”

Beede argues that his operation bears little resemblance to the slaughters that have been profiled in the national media.

Maine law

Under Maine’s 1999 commercial large game shooting areas law, which Beede helped draft, ranches have no seasons or bag limits. They are required to be licensed, to submit to twice-yearly inspections, and to have a minimum of 50 acres. However, no new ranches are allowed except the 10 that existed before the law’s passage.

Hillside’s game preserves span 400 acres.

Beede’s animals are fed to keep them from getting “scraggly,” but the rancher said his herds of European fallow deer, American elk, red stags (a species of European elk) and Asian sika deer are essentially wild animals.

“There’s deer down there that we haven’t even seen,” Beede said, gesturing to one of his fenced-in preserves. “A wild animal doesn’t want nothing to do with you. They’re not going to come feed out of your pocket. It ain’t like they want you to scratch their back.”

Maine’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife disagrees and has turned over management of hunting ranches to the Department of Agriculture, saying that Beede’s herds have more in common with domesticated cattle than with wild moose.

“You get into these critters that are kind of in never-never land,” said Fred Hurley, deputy commissioner of DIF&W. “Is a buffalo [that’s been raised on a farm] wild?”

Maine’s law outlaws hunting ranches offering native wildlife, allowing only exotic deer, boar and bison. State wildlife managers and the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine lined up to support the decision, saying that hunting ranches offering easy access to white-tailed deer or moose could undermine the traditional hunting industry and the money that it brings into the state each fall.

“There’s always concern about using private land to create hunting preserves,” Hurley said. “Maine has a lot of large landowners. The potential for closing off these areas is serious.”

Much of Maine’s prime hunting land is already in private hands, which is a major factor in Hillside’s success, Beede said.

“The opportunity of killing something in the wild is as low as it’s ever been. It’s the way society is changing,” he said.

“There’s posted land everywhere,” Beede said, boasting that his ranch offers more land than most hunters ever traverse. “Most people don’t go more than 300 yards off the road. They’re heater-hunters. They ride the roads.”

Hard-core hunters who enjoy spending several days tracking an animal in the wild are rare today, Beede said.

His clients have little leisure time and appreciate the guide services and the “no kill, no pay” guarantee that Hillside offers. In a single weekend at the ranch, a hunter can bag several different species.

Fast food

Ranches package hunting for a fast-food generation.

“The whole world has changed,” Beede said. “People don’t want to wait for anything today. They want it now.”

Vincent Gilbert travels from Littleton, Mass., every year to hunt at Hillside because of the convenience it provides.

“I’d love to hunt them in their native lands, [but] I can’t afford to go to Europe for a fallow deer,” he said.

Frank Genna, a return boar hunter from Raymond, N.H., drives eight hours to Aurora because the size of Hillside presents more of a challenge, he said.

“There are closer places for less money, but it’s like a pig in a poke,” Genna said. “At Scott’s place, you don’t feel like you’re shooting something that’s trapped.”

For critics, however, the size of a ranch is immaterial if it is enclosed by a fence.

“It’s plainly unfair and unsporting to shoot animals in a captive setting where they do not have an opportunity to escape a hunter. At some level, you can push the animals toward a fence, you can cut them off,” said Wayne Pacelle, senior vice president for the Humane Society of the United States, based in Washington, D.C.

The largest ranches do not offer prey a sporting chance, animal rights activists said.

Easy kill?

“I’m not a hunter, but I sense that in New England, there’s a real pride in the chase, not the kill,” Fisk said. “They [hunting ranches] are really attacking the culture. It’s all for the money, so they’re creating a situation where they give the hunter an easy kill.”

Beede laughed at the idea that Hillside offers easy kills. Most hunters need several days and the assistance of skilled guides to get their trophy, he said.

Deer hunting has actually been too difficult at Hillside, so Beede recently installed “shooting shacks” high in trees near feeding stations and other small clearings where the animals tend to congregate, he said.

The idea of “fair chase” is not easy to codify. Ask 100 hunters and you’ll get 100 different definitions, said George Smith, executive director of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine.

“You know Maine. We’re sort of traditionalists. It’s a different type of situation in an enclosed area,” Smith said.

“But it is possible to have a preserve in which the animal has every opportunity not to be harvested,” he said. “Just because they have the animals doesn’t mean they’re easy to get.”

Beede is cagey about disclosing exact herd sizes and success rates, but he revealed that more than 500 trophies are shipped home from Hillside each year. As many as 30 hunters might come on a single spring weekend, he said.

Boar, starting at $300 per pig, draw the majority of hunters, seeking a snarling tusked trophy and the challenge of an aggressive prey that has been described as “the poor man’s grizzly.”

Aristocratic-looking fallow deer priced at $500 and up are popular, both for their beauty and for their price.

The large game are less of a draw because of the expense – elk start at $1,000 and buffalo at $1,800.

The majority of hunters travel from out of state, and spend an average of $1,000. The high rollers are rare, but a handful of people have dropped $15,000 during a single visit, Beede said.

Trophy heads

Beede, who also guides bear and white-tailed deer hunters in season on his 6,000 acres, has no illusions about his ranch-hunting business. Although butchering services are offered, exotic species hunters are interested primarily in trophy heads. The meat is secondary, he said.

“Some of these exotics are 10 times prettier than a whitetail or a moose, and there’s nowhere else you can shoot them,” Beede said.

Hillside is unique in Maine, and Beede zealously protects the ranch’s image. Few neighbors know what can be found behind Beede’s gates. When he’s asked about tours he rebuffs the curious with a polite; “This is not a petting zoo.”

Video cameras are banned, and advertisements show neither blood nor fences.

“Everything’s clean. There’s no blood, no guts, no gore,” Beede said. “Real hunters don’t want to see that.”

Inexperienced or overzealous hunters are actually safer at Hillside than in the wild, Beede said. Several hunters have been stabbed by antlers when they harassed a deer, but no one has ever been shot.

“For some of these people, it’s probably safer to have them in an enclosed area – no one can get hurt here,” he said.

Hillside walks a delicate balance between wilderness and civilization, safety and risk. Too commercial, and the hunters won’t come. Too wild, and they’ll fail and won’t come back with the return business that comprises more than half of Beede’s income.

The rancher talks at length about the untamed nature of Hillside, while hiking the narrow deer trails that crisscross his preserve. If Beede could make a living without inviting hunters into his custom-made world, he said, he probably would.

“I belong here,” he said, walking silently through a marsh with his year-old Australian shepherd, Tara, at his heels.

Beede questions why animal rights activists, whom he calls “the antis,” would want to shut down his business.

“Have you ever seen an animal starve to death of rabies or dysentery? Have you ever been to a slaughterhouse?” he asked. “These exotics are more natural than a farmed animal that ends up on your plate.

“My animals are at least happy before they get shot,” he said with a sigh.