Hunting a big deer is one thing, but how will we know when we've gone too far? | Leggett

OK, we have deer breeder operations here in Texas.

They are many, and they have been extremely successful through the years.

And, some people don’t like them — including many among the wildlife professional ranks within Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. That dislike is at the root of the chronic wasting disease obsession that has settled on white-tailed deer in our state.

I have to be honest and admit I’ve always thought that if some people want to hunt a deer bred in captivity and then released into the wild, then that’s their choice. I still think that, even though I have no interest in those deer, even to photograph. We don’t need 2-year-old bucks that will score more than 200 Boone and Crockett inches. It doesn’t occur in nature, so why pursue it?

That said, however, it comes down to personal preferences and whatever needs we have to claim that we’ve killed a big deer.

But sometimes it goes too far, and that’s when we need to think about pumping the brakes a bit on our obsession with giant animals.

Is it too late to fix this problem?

All this is leading up to a sermon about how and why this has gone wrong and whether we can do anything to slow it down at this point. I refer to the recent news about a Montana rancher, Arthur “Jack” Schubarth of Vaughan, Mont.

Schubarth is the owner of Schubarth Ranches, where he has been engaged in trying to breed and sell a hybrid of huge bighorn and Marco Polo sheep and sell them to ranches, mostly in Texas. The Marco Polo argali is already the largest sheep in the world, with horns that can stretch to more than 5 feet in length.

I know people who have traveled to the sheep’s native Kyrgyzstan, and the sheep they have killed were enormous. So why not just hunt them there, rather than illegally import materials that could be used to produce viable embryos that could be implanted in native bighorn sheep to produce monster rams to be released on ranches where they could be hunted.

Helpful hint: Just let the sheep stay wild

Schubarth and at least five of his friends decided to do just that and illegally brought the cloning materials into the U.S. starting in 2013, according to a recent wire story. The importation was in violation of the federal Lacey Act, which prohibits movement of illegally taken animals and their parts across state and federal boundaries.

The Montana rancher is facing huge fines and penalties for violations of the act and for selling semen and bred ewes to other ranchers. There were forged veterinary inspection certificates involved, as well, and that’s scary for the native animals that are already living mostly on the edge due to population fluctuations. Not to mention that native bighorns possess extremely fragile constitutions.

One thing Texas Parks and Wildlife learned from years of trying to raise bighorns in pens at Sierra Diablo. They were hoping to be able to release enough surplus sheep to help restore bighorn populations that were decimated by overhunting as folks working to extend railroads across Texas fed the sheep to railroad workers.

The bighorns also suffer from an inability to compete with domesticated sheep, which have been widely grazed on the mountains of West Texas. If those two sheep wind up nose to nose, the bighorns can get a fatal dose of pneumonia and soon die.

When will we know when it's too late to stop?

It’s a classic case of unintended consequences. In trying to breed bigger, better animals or protect waterways and lakes, humans wind up doing so much more damage than ever imagined. Nutrias are a perfect example.

The South American rodent was imported in the 1930s in an attempt to serve the fur trade and to control water hyacinths. The prolific breeders quickly overwhelmed rivers and swamps and private lakes, doing incredible damage to dams and levees. It forced landowners and wildlife organizations to begin removal programs to try to keep them from doing more damage.

Illegally released pythons in the Florida Everglades have become more than a nuisance species. They are now being caught and killed for their hides but not before they did irreparable damage to the ecosystem down there.

The list goes on, but it needs to stop here and now. We don’t need or want any kind of accidentally released virus or disease that could kill all the native bighorns species in the Rocky Mountain West and the mountains of the Trans-Pecos and Mexico.

Enough money is enough money, and if we can’t be satisfied with the animals we already have living on the land without bringing in Frankenstein monster sheep and deer and elk, we don’t deserve to hunt at all.

Give it up or let it go. End of sermon.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: It's a bad idea to start bringing in bighorn sheep to hunt in Texas