One Heck Of A Ride

74 The Texas Exotics Chapter 7 “Exotic” is the word hunters (especially in Texas) use to describe a game animal from another continent that has been introduced to North America for hunting. It also describes the hybrids game ranchers create especially for hunting. I am the first to say that hunting an exotic on a game ranch is not like hunting the same animal in its native habitat overseas, but it can be the next best thing. Just try hunting an Indian nilgai or a North African aoudad on a 10,000-acre high-fenced property with rugged terrain and ample cover if you think hunting behind high wire presents no challenges! I especially enjoy the ability to hunt year around and the fact that raising the rare animals on American ranches is helping preserve species that are threatened with extinction in their native lands. There also is the argument that some exotics have been here so long they might as well be called “semi-indigenous.” For example, nilgai, a large and wonderfully tasting antelope from Nepal and India, were the first exotic to be brought to Texas and California a hundred years ago. Aoudad from North Africa have been hunted in Texas for nearly as long as nilgai, as have blackbuck antelope, barasingha, axis deer, fallow deer, and sika deer. African game animals such as eland, greater kudu, gemsbok, sable antelope, wildebeest, scimitar-horned oryx, addax, Thomson’s gazelle, and springbok arrived later, but they also have been on Texas ranches for many generations. Not all of these introduced animals are confined by high fences. At the last estimate Texas had more than 250,000 exotic animals representing seventy-six species, and nearly half of that number were a dozen species on low-fenced properties where they are free to come and go in that state’s Hill Country. All things considered, raising and hunting exotics (and all the peripheral expenditures involved with them) is a $3.3 billion industry in Texas. As you saw in another chapter, my first taste of hunting an exotic came in December 1983 after I took a big Texas white-tailed deer, and two javelinas on the Turcotte Ranch near Sanderson in Jim Hogg County. With a few days left before I had to get back to Lompoc, my friend Wally Bolt and I drove to Kendell County, and I shot a Corsican sheep, a hybrid created by breeding European mouflon with haired (not woolly) domestic sheep. The animal was so unique that the original breeder, the YO Ranch, trademarked it. Although hunting on Wally’s ranch was not difficult I enjoyed hunting with him and I remember the good times we shared every time I see the life-size mount of the gold medal ram I took with him. Aoudad In Edwards County Author’s daughter, Paige, and a handsome Indian blackbuck. Texas 1987 Author with a Gold Metal Corsican Sheep