The Native American media network Indian Country Today has taken aim at the Texas Hunt Lodge exotic game ranch (based in Hunt, Texas) for offering its clients a $13,500 “rare White Buffalo hunt.”
“American Indians across the internet are flocking to the website of Texas Hunt Lodge today—and not because they’re planning a hunting trip,” the article began.
White buffalo are considered sacred animals to most Native Americans. Coincidentally, as the Indian Country story notes, the most famous white buffalo in the country right now is probably Lightning Medicine Cloud, who was born at the Lakota Ranch in Greenville, Texas, on May 12, 2011.
But the animals can also be bred–albeit in still-miniscule quantities–and such hunts are nothing new. On its blog, Texas Hunt Lodge documented the harvest of one from May 2011, with 82-year-old Don Wortman of Ingram taking down a record animal:
Wortman’s Monster White Buffalo had impressive 20 inch horns with over 14 inch bases making it the pending World Record White Buffalo for Trophy Game Records of the World. The White Buffalo will now be honored as a Diamond Trophy (largest ever taken for that species and method of hunting) for TGR Record Books this coming year.
And in March 2010, Carter Camp of the indigenous peoples blog Censored News wrote about an eBay listing posted by Harper’s Lone Star Ranch Exotic Hunts. “Some ignorant wasicu are offering to let anyone kill our relative for money,” Camp wrote. Perhaps as a result, the auction listing was removed. Lone Star Ranch’s current site has no published information on its “super exotics,” only an instruction to “call for pricing.”
The outcry seems to have begun last week with a Causes.com petition, and the subsequent Indian Country Today story received more than 2,000 “shares” and more than 1,000 “likes” on Facebook.
That level of activity was enough, apparently, for Texas Hunt Lodge to adopt the same sort of discretion Lone Star Ranch did–by Tuesday night, the link to the page Indian Country Today wrote about, while still appearing on the lodge’s website, was no longer functional, instead defaulting back to the main home page.
