Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
History Lesson 
Which Side of the Fence Are You On?
All over Texas, ranchers are putting up eight-foot fences to keep their deer from roaming so they can charge more for hunting leases. Purists say shooting such deer doesn't amount to "fair chase." Biologists say penning them in causes disease. I say it's the best thing that could happen to the land.
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Johnston wants to do for trophy hunting what sportsman Ray Scott did for bass fishing—popularize and professionalize it—and so far, he's done an effective job. Sixty thousand readers purchase copies of The Journal of the Texas Trophy Hunters, a bimonthly magazine chock-full of hunters' stories ("Remembering Dale Earnhardt: Fast Cars and Big Bucks," "Kimble County Monster") sandwiched between advertisements for rifles, hydraulic hunting blinds, hunting leases, and automated feeders. More than 100,000 people attend the TTHA-sponsored Hunters Extravaganzas held every August in Fort Worth, San Antonio, and Houston. You can watch Johnston every week on the half-hour Texas Trophy Hunters Show, on the Outdoor Channel. Though Johnston insists that his main objective is to improve the "quality" of the deer, the message being conveyed through those media is, It's not about the meat anymore, or the chase, or the man versus beast struggle. It's all about large, multipoint sets of antlers that you can mount over your fireplace. "Back in the old days, in a deer camp, when the hunting season opened, the hero of the camp was the one who got the first buck," explains Johnston. "It didn't matter if it was ten points or not. We didn't think of management for quality. That kind of thinking has changed."
His organization is the most visible advocate for high fences and for the right of the landowners behind them to manage their property as they wish. His influence is evident in the photographs hanging on the walls of his office. They show Johnston posing with Nolan Ryan, Ted Nugent, Goose Gossage, Slim Pickens, Earl Campbell, Red Duke, and Chuck Yeager. His argument boils down to this: The person who owns a ranch is the true steward of his land and should manage his own wildlife. This is in total opposition to tradition and history in Texas; the state has always regulated wild animals. "What happens in here is not going to affect anyone but me," says Johnston, who has a three-hundred-acre high-fenced ranch near Castroville. Self-interest is a persuasive tool in keeping the deer on his land free of disease, he says. "If something goes wrong inside a high fence," he asks rhetorically, "who's damaged?"
In addition to the Trophy Hunters Association, Johnston helped start the Texas Deer Association three years ago as an advocacy group for scientific deer breeders. The idea was to try to fight some of the rules imposed by Texas Parks and Wildlife, which many breeders claim are unusually onerous and restrictive. The paperwork required to breed deer and to conduct hunts is the stuff dreamed up by bureaucrats. Parks and Wildlife is all about the number of deer on a given piece of land, breeders point out, not what kind of deer are on that land, which explains the runty condition of deer overpopulating lands on the fringes of Texas cities. The regulators are slow to adapt to change and are not inclined to accommodate high-fenced game ranches. "We understand why law enforcement wants certain things done," says Johnston, "but how they get those objectives isn't helping deer, as far as we're concerned. The rules and regulations are being designed by non-users. Texas is way ahead of other states in terms of managing wildlife, but the state's deal is quantity. Quality isn't a factor in those regulations. Landowners just need to be turned loose. It's been like pulling teeth." Then he adds, "The state needs to see a separate set of regulations for intensively managed high-fence property."
"GAME MANAGEMENT," SAYS JAMES Kroll, driving to his high-fenced, two-hundred-acre spread near Nacogdoches, "is the last bastion of communism." Kroll, also known as Dr. Deer, is the director of the Forestry Resources Institute of Texas at Stephen F. Austin State University, and the "management" he is referring to is the sort practiced by the State of Texas. The 55-year-old Kroll is the leading light in the field of private deer management as a means to add value to the land. His belief is so absolute that some detractors refer to him as Dr. Dough, implying that his eye is on the bottom line more than on the natural world.
Kroll, who has been the foremost proponent of deer ranching in Texas for more than thirty years, doesn't mind the controversy and certainly doesn't fade in the heat. People who call for more public lands are "cocktail conservationists," he says, who are really pining for socialism. He calls national parks "wildlife ghettos" and flatly accuses the government of gross mismanagement. He argues that his relatively tiny acreage, marked by eight-foot fences and posted signs warning off would-be poachers, is a better model for keeping what's natural natural while making money off the land.
A trip to South Africa six years ago convinced Kroll that he was on the right track. There he encountered areas of primitive, lush wildlife-rich habitats called game ranches. They were privately owned, privately managed, and enclosed by high fences. He noticed how most of the land outside those fences had been grazed to the nub, used up. "Game ranches there derive their income from these animals—viewing them, hunting them, selling their meat," he says. "There are no losers." At his own ranch Kroll has set up a smaller version of the same thing. His land is indeed lush, verdant, with pine groves, an abundance of undergrowth, wild orchids, New Jersey tea, jack-in-the-pulpits, and other native plants. He has also set up a full-scale breeding research center and is one of twenty Texas deer breeders using artificial insemination to improve his herd. "We balance sex and age ratio," he says. "We manage habitat. We control the population and manage for hunting. I want to leave the deer herd better than it was before we came."
When the subject of chronic wasting disease on high-fenced elk ranches in Colorado is raised, he casts a wary eye. "You know where that started? On a state-run research farm." He believes that private landowners would never let that happen. Like Johnston, he argues that the landowner who relies on his land for a living has plenty of motivation to keep diseases at bay.
Lately the power has been shifting in Kroll's direction. Last year deer-ranching interests persuaded Parks and Wildlife to alter rules and allow landowners to choose their own biologists in creating wildlife-management plans for their land, rather than have one from Parks and Wildlife. That has given landowners more freedom, says Kroll, but he wants even more. "You still have to let the state on your land to get a wildlife-management permit," he says.
THOUGH HIGH FENCES REMAIN the subject of hot controversy, more and more experts seem to be coming to the opinion—however reluctantly—that when used properly they can be good for both hunters and environmentalists. Scot Williamson, the former director of big-game programs for Parks and Wildlife, isn't particularly fond of the concept of high fences, but he condones the practice as long as it's on land that would support the wildlife on it naturally. "If you have a twenty-thousand-acre ranch that is high-fenced, your conditions for managing your deer herd for quality and proper density are much better," he says. "At the end of the day, the ecological health of that ranch is improved. But I don't extend that to a two-hundred-acre place where you have to systematically feed your deer. You're not improving your natural habitat or helping the ecology. All you're doing is making money. If you're going to enclose a deer herd, that herd should be able to survive without supplemental feed.
"Even the ultrapurist Boone and Crockett Club has begun to recognize that there may be no turning back. Though the organization still refuses to certify game that has been confined by artificial barriers, it recently formed a committee to set up a separate category in their North American Big Game Records Program for game taken behind high fences. Several other states already have some high fencing, including Michigan and Colorado.
I'm not sure it's right for them. But for Texas, it'll do, given the circumstances. Look at it as one of the latest manifestations of our peculiar, long-standing cultural relationship with hoofed creatures—from horses, buffaloes, cows, sheep, and goats to exotics like llamas, zebras, and scimitar-horned oryx. In a strange way, ranching the white-tailed deer brings the relationship full circle, back into the (tamed) wild, back to nature.
For those hunters and non-hunters who are still troubled by the ethics of high fences, I offer a quote from Dr. Deer on the subject. "Think of it from an anthropomorphic standpoint," he says. "Cattle, we raise in pens, load them up, and knock them over the head. Deer, we raise and then release them into their native habitat. They're harvested with guns and bows. If you had to be cut down, how would you want to die?"
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