Salt Fork Ranch, LLC.

In the era of hot new cartridges, the old .25/06 deserves more respect: https://trib.al/YG3ori7

A good reminder!

I've hunted all over the globe, and that has led to some strange and incredible wild game meals: https://trib.al/QlFCc4K

Operation Dalmatian is the craziest undercover poaching operation you’ve never heard of. It started in East Texas after deer hunting with dogs had been banned. Landowners and legal hunters were complaining that groups in Jasper and Newton counties were still running deer with dogs, crossing onto private land, using public roads, intimidating people, and acting like the law did not apply to them.

So two Texas game wardens went undercover as a house painter and his wife. They rented a place near Kirbyville, put signs on their vehicles, handed out business cards, showed up around town, and slowly built a cover story. Then they told people they had lost a black-and-white Walker hound. That was the opening. These were dog hunters, so a missing hound gave the undercover officers a reason to talk to them without looking suspicious.

It worked. The main target owned a grocery and liquor store near the Jasper-Newton county line and kept hunting dogs behind the store. The undercover officer eventually offered to help paint the man’s new log home. While he was painting, the man invited him on a dog-deer hunt after the next rain.

From there, the undercover wardens documented 8 illegal dog-deer hunts. Some had only a few people. One had 31 hunters involved. They used CB radios, posted hunters along public roads, released dogs multiple times a day, warned each other when wardens were nearby, and hid untagged deer in the brush until they thought it was safe to move them.

According to the report, 4 deer were killed, 2 were wounded, and 3 more were shot at during one undercover hunt. The deer were not tagged. The group had a system. If a warden showed up, someone would stall him, someone else would warn the group over the radio, and the deer would be moved later.

Some of the details are insane. On one hunt, a drunk member threatened a game warden by name and took a lookout position on the road. On another hunt, the real local game warden ran into the undercover officers with the group, recognized them, and still played along by writing one of them a ticket for not wearing hunter orange. That ticket actually helped their cover because the dog hunters trusted them more after it.

At one point, members of the group were watching the undercover officer through rifle scopes while he was standing with them. They also talked over CB radios about trespassing, stealing deer feeders, destroying property, and retaliating against people who called the game warden.

When Operation Dalmatian ended, wardens went after 25 defendants. Twenty-three were arrested the same day. The case produced 45 charges, including 38 for hunting deer with dogs and 6 for unlawful possession of deer. Forty of the charges ended in convictions.

I’ll put the link to the actual report in the comments so you can read the whole thing for yourself.

A 200-inch Kentucky buck was sold to Bass Pro Shops, and the money was used to take a church youth group to Jamaica to fix up an orphanage. In 2000, Robert W. Smith killed a giant Kentucky typical that scored 204 2/8 Boone & Crockett after watching a doe step out of a thick two-acre brush patch, then seeing the buck come out behind her at only 10 yards. Like most giant deer stories, the drama started immediately. Locals weren’t happy, one person even took Smith to court over supposed trespassing, but the guy who helped him drag the buck out happened to be the county sheriff’s son. Smith eventually sold the rack to Bass Pro Shops, and instead of just pocketing the story, he used the money to help take a church youth group to Jamaica to fix up an orphanage. That’s one of the strangest and coolest endings I’ve ever heard to a 200-inch whitetail story.

— Stephen Ziegler
Outdoor writer | Owner, DeLong Lures

Tragic death has father asking! Is the state doing enough to manage alligators?

The tragic death of 31-year-old Brittany Clark has reignited a difficult conversation. Clark was killed after being attacked by a 13-foot alligator while swimming in central Florida. Her father now says the state isn’t doing enough to control growing alligator populations or protect the public.

Florida is home to an estimated 1.3 million alligators. Each year, the state issues about 7,000 alligator harvest permits, allowing hunters to harvest up to 14,000 alligators. On top of that, Florida removes another 7,000 to 8,000 nuisance alligators through its complaint-driven removal program after receiving roughly 14,000 to 15,000 nuisance complaints from residents annually.

Even with more than 20,000 alligators removed each year, questions remain. Is Florida keeping up with a growing alligator population and increasing human development, or should the state expand hunting opportunities and issue more tags?

What do you think? Should Florida issue more alligator tags, or is the current management program enough?

Aaron B. Futrell, Author|Owner, Delong Lures

What would you do if you were sitting in the woods and a deer walked out wearing an orange vest because some local Karen decided she was going to “save” it from hunters? Are you letting that deer walk, or are you putting it in the freezer? Putting a vest on a wild deer does not magically make it somebody’s pet, and it sure doesn’t make it illegal to shoot if it’s during deer season. But let’s be honest, you know exactly what happens next. Half the town is crying, somebody is calling the news, and suddenly you’re the monster who shot “Bambi in a safety vest.” So what are you doing? Are you filling the freezer, or are you letting Karen win this one?

— Stephen Ziegler
Outdoor writer | Rack Junkies Podcast

In 1970, New Mexico released fifteen wild goats from Iran into a ten-mile desert mountain range near the Mexican border. The population exploded to over a thousand animals. Fifty-five years later, an aerial survey using thermal cameras counted 185.

The Florida Mountains sit outside Deming in southern New Mexico. Hunters call them the Rock. The range is compact and brutal, roughly ten miles long and five miles wide, rising sharply out of the flat Chihuahuan Desert with steep cliff faces, sharp ridgelines, and enough broken rock to make a man on foot question every step. From the highway, the mountains look barren. Up close, they hold springs, seeps, and enough browse to support an animal that was designed for exactly this kind of terrain on the other side of the world.

The New Mexico Department of Game and Fish imported fifteen Persian ibex from Iran and released them into the Floridas in 1970. Shortly after, another twenty-seven were added. The Persian ibex, also called the bezoar ibex, is regarded as the ancestor of the domestic goat. It stands about thirty inches at the shoulder. Males weigh up to 110 pounds. Females run about sixty. Both sexes grow horns, but the males carry scimitar-shaped curves that can exceed fifty inches, sweeping back over the body in arcs that look engineered for a museum display case rather than a living animal.

The ibex took to the Rock immediately. The terrain matched their evolutionary spec sheet so precisely that within four years the population was large enough to hunt. New Mexico opened the first public ibex season in 1974. The hunt became one of the most sought-after tags in the state, a once-in-a-lifetime draw with odds under five percent.

What makes the ibex story different from every other wildlife introduction story on this page is that the animal was never supposed to be here at all. This was not a native species restored to its historic range. There were no Persian ibex in North America before 1970. There were no Persian ibex anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. New Mexico deliberately placed a Middle Eastern cliff goat into a desert mountain system because the habitat geometry matched and the state wanted an exotic big-game opportunity. The Florida Mountains became the only location in the Western Hemisphere where pure, unfenced, free-ranging Persian ibex exist in the wild.

The animals earned their reputation through the terrain they chose to live in. A NMDGF biologist who conducts the annual aerial helicopter survey described watching ibex outmaneuver the helicopter while literally running across a sheer cliff. During surveys, groups of ibex have been photographed ducking into small caves located high in cliff faces that no person could reach without climbing gear. The ibex stand thirty inches tall and weigh less than a large dog, but they move across vertical rock with the mechanical confidence of an animal that has been doing it for a few million years longer than anything native to New Mexico.

The population peaked above a thousand animals. The department managed the herd through hunting, maintaining a target of 350 to 500 ibex in the Floridas. The ibex were kept strictly within the mountain range. Game biologists managed them carefully to prevent them from spreading into adjacent ranges, primarily because Persian ibex can carry pneumonia that could devastate New Mexico's native desert bighorn sheep populations.
Then the numbers started falling.

Stewart Liley, head of the NMDGF Wildlife Division, told commissioners in January 2026 that the ibex population is far below desired levels. The April 2024 aerial survey using thermal imaging cameras counted 185 animals on the mountain. Groups of hundreds that hunters used to glass from the desert floor have been replaced by groups of five. Out of roughly 300 licenses issued in the most recent season, hunters killed ten males and one female. Hunter satisfaction is down. Liley said the department will propose significant permit reductions.

The cause of the decline is not definitively established in the public record. Desert mountain populations are vulnerable to drought, disease, predation by mountain lions, and the cumulative pressure of decades of hunting on a geographically isolated herd with no immigration from outside populations. The ibex cannot recruit from Iran. They cannot disperse to a neighboring mountain range without risking contact with bighorn sheep. They are locked onto one ten-mile piece of rock in southern New Mexico, and the population that was once large enough to absorb annual hunting pressure is now small enough that every dead ibex changes the math.

The Florida Mountains are the only place on the continent where a hunter can draw a tag for a Persian ibex and climb into Asian cliff-goat terrain without leaving the United States. Whether that opportunity survives depends on whether 185 animals on one desert mountain range can hold a population that once numbered a thousand, in a landscape where there is no backup herd, no genetic input, and no second mountain to fall back on.

Source: New Mexico Department of Game and Fish / New Mexico Wildlife Federation / NMDGF Wildlife Magazine.

The ASPCA is known for those heartbreaking sad-dog commercials with Sarah McLachlan playing in the background, but what do they actually spend the money on? In 2024, the ASPCA reported $446 million in total revenue. They spent about $153 million on salaries, compensation, and employee benefits, and about $79.6 million on fundraising expenses. Meanwhile, their tax filing shows $23.3 million in grants and similar amounts paid out. That means 95% of their spending is on salaries and raising money and 5% of what they brought in is given to projects. Only a small fraction of that 5% went to animal shelters most people think they are helping.

The ASPCA is also an anti hunting organization. ASPCA’s own policy says it opposes sport hunting (whatever that is), even when the animal is eaten. So when people see the sad dog commercials and think their money is going straight to the local shelter down the road, that is not how this works. This is a massive national fundraising machine with anti-hunting policy positions, and before people donate, they should probably understand where the money is actually going.

— Stephen Ziegler
Outdoor writer | Owner, DeLong Lures