Shooting Leopards in a Barrel

By EMILY MITCHELL

They are called "canned hunts," but by any name they are slaughter, not sport, with no vestige of a fair contest between man and beast. In pursuit of a trophy to hang on the wall or a videotape of their exploits, well-to-do hunters in the U.S. are paying thousands of dollars to shoot defenseless exotic animals at point-blank range. There is no accurate count of the number of such killings, but authorities are finally beginning to crack down on them.

Floyd Lester Patterson III, a rancher in Monterey County, Calif., was charged in April with 27 misdemeanors involving illegal possession and transportation of animals and parts of animals on the endangered-species list. When drought forced him to sell off most of his cattle, Patterson began conducting legal hunts of boar and other game. Then he allegedly obtained nine large cats that are on the endangered-species list, including a spotted leopard and a Bengal tiger. Some of them were probably purchased from zoos. According to the charges, hunters paid around $3,500 each to blast away at the animals; several may have been killed a few feet from their cages.

Similar grisly rites apparently took place at the 160-acre Texoma Hunting Wilderness owned by Charles B. ("Bart") Bartholomew, in Bryan County, Okla., about 100 miles northeast of Dallas. For roughly $8,000 each, hunters could stand in a fenced field where mountain lions, grizzly bears and other beasts were prodded out of cages into their gunsights. State and federal agents raided the multimillion-dollar operation and arrested Bartholomew. His trial ended last week in a plea bargain; he will spend six months in jail, do 400 hours of community service and forfeit his "preserve" to the state. County district attorney Theresa McGehee says, "I think we've made our statement: we as a society are not going to tolerate this."

In Texas, says federal fish and wildlife agent Jim Stinebaugh, canned hunts are quick and dirty, most of them the work of "fly-by-night promoters who find a cat at an exotic-animal auction and then put a deal together." Two hunting guides, Daniel Lee Moody and Ronald Terrell McCloud, were indicted in San Antonio last April for unlawfully conspiring to sell and transport a black leopard; McCloud has pleaded guilty to a lesser charge. A sickening videotape shows the leopard being released from a cage and running under a nearby pickup truck. A pack of dogs flushed it out of hiding, and for $3,000, a "hunter" | from Louisiana had the privilege of shooting the panic-stricken animal.

Increasingly, breeders are raising exotic animals specifically for hunting. Investigations of canned hunts and wildlife-trafficking operations are under way in Texas and elsewhere, but weak and conflicting laws make officials' jobs harder. An animal may have federal protection as a member of an endangered species, for example, yet no statute prevents a zoo from selling it to private owners within the same state. Additional legal pressure will be needed to give current restrictions more teeth. True hunters should be delighted to join in bringing an end to a perverted bloodlust.

With reporting by Kathy Shocket/Phoenix and Don Winbush/Atlanta