The start of the deer rifle hunting season is a busy time for Texas Parks and Wildlife Game Wardens as more of their time is being devoted to tracking and prosecuting poachers.
"I feel that it's a bigger problem during the season of a lot of people not abiding by our laws," Game Warden Cane Shumaker told NBC 5.
Despite what many might think, Shumaker said poaching is far from a problem that is isolated in the rural areas of the state.
"Even though this is the Metroplex, even though this is an extension of Dallas and it's the Dallas-Fort Worth area, poaching is a huge problem here," he said.
Two areas that Shumaker, who covers both Tarrant and Denton counties, routinely receives reports of poaching are in the area around Lake Worth and along Texas 114 in Trophy Club.
In Trophy Club, Shumaker said, poachers routinely perform "thrill kills," where they pull along the side of the highway, spotlight a deer in the trees off to the side of the road, shoot it and then leave it behind to die.
"Just this last week I think, I had three deer calls where we had deer come out from the woods that people had seen where they had actual arrows stuck in their head or their neck or something," he said. "And that's a poaching shot."
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Shumaker emphasized that in his decade-plus as a Game Warden, he can "count on his hand," the number of poachers he has caught in the act on his own.
Instead, he said, the majority of poaching cases begin with an anonymous phone call to the Texas Operation Game Thief hotline at 800-792-GAME (4263).
As of Nov. 5, there had been 1,586 poaching reports made to the hotline across the state, an average of more than five per day.
