Paradise for a Price Commercial preserves breed controversy

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Part two of two

Visit a ranch in Texas, the billion-dollar heart of the controversial hunting preserve industry, and chances are you’ll find magnificent red stags that originated in Aroostook County.

Shakaree Red Deer Farm, located in rural New Limerick, south of Houlton, is known internationally for its animals’ broad antlers and large bodies – precisely the qualities that hunters look for in a $10,000 trophy animal.

“They absolutely have fantastic stock,” said Jim Ray, a deer rancher in central Florida, who purchases animals from Shakaree. “They’ve got one of the best genetics and breeding programs in the business.”

In 1994, owner Gary Dwyer started New England’s first red deer farm with frozen 6-day-old embryos – each the size of a pinpoint – shipped from a champion farm in New Zealand.

Today, Shakaree has grown into a multimillion-dollar business, and the hunting ranch industry, which buys both mature trophy stags and breeding animals, provides a major portion of its income.

“The commercial hunting preserves will save the deer farming industry,” farm manager Mark Drew said.

Simple arithmetic prompts exotic-deer farmers such as Dwyer to add hunting preserves to their operations. Last fall, Dwyer created Mountain Shadows. Forty hunters paid between $1,500 and $10,000 to shoot exotic deer that would have brought Dwyer only about $600 each if butchered and sold for venison.

“Hunting is just one part of what we do, but it can take us from a break-even year to a good year,” Drew, the farm manager, said. “This is the best year we’ve ever had, even with the economy down.”

Nearly 100 Maine farms are currently breeding European red deer, elk, Japanese sika deer. Only nine of them, scattered from Ashland to Scarborough, have registered to become hunting preserves, according to state records.

Drew is hesitant to allow a description of Shakaree’s exact location to appear in print,

because a fellow Maine farmer recently had his fence cut by animal rights activists who opposed the hunting of what are essentially domesticated farm animals.

“They don’t go to beef farms and let all the cows out. We’re no different,” Drew said.

Traditional farm setting

The deer at Mountain Shadows spend the majority of their lives in a traditional farm setting. A brightly painted wooden barn greets visitors to Shakaree. Deer cluster in grassy pens. Drew feeds his herd, which can be as large as 1,300 animals, about 4,000 large round bales of clover and 370 tons of grain each year.

Breeding is carefully monitored, and the lineage of each deer is recorded with the care given to a triple-crown champion. Bloodlines can be traced back several generations and verified with DNA samples held in a national database.

When a hunter arranges a visit to Mountain Shadows, a deer or two is set loose in one of two wooded preserves – a 165-acre shotgun and rifle area, and a 95-acre bow and pistol area. Hunters stalk their trophy or wait in tree stands, but often come away empty-handed, Drew said.

A handful of people have contacted Shakaree, asking to have a tame trophy stag placed in front of their shotgun, and Dywer “absolutely refused,” he said.

The farm and the hunting preserve have separate names and separate driveways so that a trophy hunter will never cross paths with a local family that stops by to see the new crop of fawns.

“When people come here to hunt, they don’t even realize they’re on a farm,” Drew said.

But despite the farm’s best efforts at creating a distinction between Shakaree and Mountain Shadows, the deer, which have been domesticated for 1,000 years, do not behave like skittish white-tails. On a recent visit to Shakaree, herds of curious females chased a truck as it drove by their pens.

Within each pen is a distinct population group which serves a different facet of Shakaree’s business.

Three hundred females, called hinds, whose genetics make them good breeding candidates, are swelled with pregnancy, ready for sale to other farms and ranches. A few hundred lesser endowed females will be butchered for venison roasts and deer jerky, which is sold in five states.

“The males are too valuable to put into venison,” Drew said.

Six breeding males are used solely to pass on their revered bloodlines. The remaining 400 or so males serve a dual purpose. As juveniles, their velvet-covered antlers are harvested annually and sold to make a dietary supplement common in Asian medicine. Once they reach six years of age, most are considered trophy stags and sold for hunting or breeding.

“We supply most of the major buyers in the country now,” Drew said. “They want a certain bloodline, and we can provide it.”

Hundreds of animals are shipped from Shakaree annually to keep the whole complex business running. More than 70 deer farms nationwide have purchased hundreds of Shakaree deer to build their own breeding and hunting herds, and on average, 75 stags are shipped specifically for trophy hunting each year.

Fear of disease

If federal legislation proposed by Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del. is approved, however, all interstate transport of exotic animals destined for hunting preserves will be outlawed.

Biden has cited the moral concerns of animal rights activists in recent speeches promoting the Captive Exotic Animal Protection Act, but he also argues that these large exotic deer populations could breed disease, placing native species at risk.

“It allows them to have these unnatural densities, and the crowding of animals in these environments has fostered disease,” said Wayne Pacelle, senior vice president for the Humane Society of the United States.

Deer farms are particularly at risk for chronic wasting disease, a neurological disorder that affects cervids – the scientific classification which includes deer, elk and moose. The disease emerged in Colorado elk populations in 1967, has swiftly spread through the western United States, and recently, jumped the Mississippi River. Many critics blame the interstate exotic animal trade for the expansion.

CWD is similar to bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly known as mad cow disease, explained state veterinarian Chip Ridky. Both diseases destroy an animal’s brain during a long dormant period before rabies-like symptoms are exhibited.

“A rogue protein kind of just chews on the brain,” Ridky said.

Ironically, the spread of CWD has increased red deer farmers’ need to enter the hunting market, because Korea and other Asian nations have closed their borders to American deer antler velvet, and the price has decreased from a mid-90s high of $80 per lb. to $30 per lb. on average, Dwyer said.

Like mad cow disease, CWD cannot be detected by a blood test, and the disease is incurable. However, unlike BSE, no one has ever contracted the human form of the disease from eating venison. The disease has been found primarily in wild populations of elk and mule deer, Drew said.

“People think that this is a disease of farmed deer, and it’s not,” he said.

Biologists doubt that exotic populations could be immune to the disease, however, and CWD has been found in Western red deer herds, Ridky said.

“Typically, less is known about exotics – their resistance to diseases, and what to test for,” he said.

Maine’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, too, is concerned about disease, which is one of the primary reasons why white-tail deer farms are prohibited in the state, Fred Hurley, deputy DIF&W commissioner, said.

Drastic measures

The state has taken drastic measures to protect Maine’s native deer population, Ridky said. Any state in which CWD has been found is permanently banned from transporting animals into Maine.

“It’s such a long incubation period in that disease that we just prohibit them completely,” Ridky said.

Additionally, Maine requires extensive health testing of deer and elk before they are issued health permits to enter the state.

“The deer industry is practically the most heavily tested animal industry there is,” Drew said. “The state has had its nose in it just enough to keep the wrong animals from coming into the state.”

Because of this testing, Maine has a good national reputation for offering “clean” deer populations, said Phyllis Menden, executive director of the North American Deer Farming Association.

“It’s way up at the top of the list,” she said.

But testing requirements are not nationally standardized, particularly for exotic species.

“The animal movement restrictions are inconsistent from state to state, and those inconsistencies make it risky,” Ridky said.

Deer farmers and hunting preserve owners alike said that they would never risk infecting their herds by smuggling species across the border.

“No one that’s doing it right is going to take a chance bringing sick animals into their place,” said Scott Beede, who owns Hillside Game Ranch in Aurora.

“Even if the state didn’t, I’d require testing. It’s only to protect my own stock,” added Moella Craig, who runs Craig Deer Farm in Ashland with her husband, John.

Ridky agreed, saying that farm owners are vigilant.

“When people are doing something that will jeopardize the entire industry, we usually hear about it,” he said.

But the veterinarian worries that a single irresponsible person could slip infected animals into Maine. State police checkpoints have been used to occasionally monitor animal transport, but the state does not have the resources to guarantee that every shipment is inspected, and a single illegal introduction of a CWD infected animal could decimate Maine’s white-tail population.

“I’m worried that if people don’t abide by the law we’re going to have a problem here,” Ridky said. “We know when the legal ones are coming, but we don’t know about everything that’s going over the border.”