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November/December 2002 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Feature: Bighorn sheep The Inside Story Reverberations À la carte Mosaic

Sacrificial Ram (feature) |  Bighorn sheep facts | Bighorns on the move | Archives

Every Fall, Alberta’s little band of national park wardens and provincial conservation officers joins forces in a cat-and-mouse game with a dedicated band of bighorn sheep hunters. The wardens and officers try to uphold the law, while the hunters try to get a legal trophy. The game goes on today much as it did in the 1970s, when I was a warden in Jasper National Park. But the stakes are higher, because the value of a world-class bighorn ram to collectors has risen from around $50,000 a few decades ago to about a million bucks today. You don’t have You don’t have to be a Freudian to analyze this obsession with big horns.

I am a hunter. Not a trophy hunter, but one grateful for the chance to provide my family with healthy wild meats, free of penicillin and growth hormones. Trophy hunting, once the sport of aristocrats, is something entirely different. Teddy Roosevelt, for one, popularized the sport merely by participating in it. Anyone, of course, can pursue a trophy sheep, but it takes big money to find the best. The obsession with ram horns reached a fever pitch in the early 1950s with the cult of the grand-slam hunter who, to prove his superiority as a sheep hunter, had to shoot a trophy from each of the four main types of wild sheep: Dall (Ovis dalli), Stone (O.d. stonei), Rocky Mountain bighorn (Ovis canadensis) and California bighorn (O.c. californiana).

Of the four, most hunters will tell you, the Rocky Mountain bighorn is the hardest trophy to obtain — legally, that is. The unscrupulous will stop at little to obtain this prize. One of the worst incidents occurred two decades ago near a campground parking lot at the Columbia Icefield in Jasper National Park, where Michael Shipsey, a millionaire hunter from California, shot a trophy ram on the highway with a pistol while his Canadian guide fed the sheep bread crusts. The guide was apprehended, spent 75 days in jail and paid a $5,000 fine. He lost his guiding licence and his hunting territory in British Columbia. In an international investigation coordinated by Jasper park warden John Steele, Shipsey was convicted in the United States on seven counts involving illegally killed game. He received a $14,000 (U.S.) fine, 40 days in jail and five years’ probation.

On the legal side, Sherwin Scott of Phoenix, Ariz., spent $1.1 million at auctions in 1998 and 1999 for a permit to hunt Alberta rams in special out-of-season "Minister’s Hunts" held during the rut and sanctioned by the provincial
Sustainable Resource Development department. Two years ago, Guinn Crousen, a Texas businessman, paid $200,000 (U.S.) and took an Alberta ram that beat the world-record trophy set by an Alberta rancher in 1911.

For provincial fish-and-wildlife departments, managing wildlife populations is a tough job at any time. They enforce game laws, monitor wildlife populations, police industrial activity that affects wildlife and remove wildlife which endangers humans or preys on livestock. To manage effectively, they need access to good research. But in Alberta, fewer and fewer dollars for such research are coming from the government. In June, the department of Sustainable Resource Development announced cuts of $8 million from its $190 million budget. Eighty jobs were to be cut, including some 34 people in the Fish and Wildlife Management program.

Alberta is just one of the many governments, from Arizona to Mongolia, that auctions off trophy animals for big bucks. Eighty-five percent of the money raised in Alberta hunts goes to wildlife conservation in general, 15 percent to administration. Money from the trophy auctions now finances wildlife research that the government is no longer willing to fund with tax dollars. The work of wildlife managers is being compromised by their own politicians, who are selling off Alberta’s official mammal to the highest bidder while off-loading financial commitments for wildlife research and management onto hunter-based conservation charities, many of which were established in the 1990s. Increasingly, government biologists must appeal to these private charities for research funding. With the Minister’s Hunt, the bighorn has, in effect, become Alberta’s sacrificial ram, offered up every year at the altars of privatization. Meanwhile, the animal’s habitat is under assault on all fronts by industrial development, and some of the remaining sheep seem more like game-farm animals than wild bighorns.

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