Just when we thought we had seen it all...
If there is one wildlife agency in North America that seems to see stranger cases than any other, it would be the Oklahoma Game Wardens. They are constantly posting some of the most unusual poaching busts to their extremely popular Facebook page. Every time we think their latest bust cannot be topped a new case pops up that makes us shake our heads.
Their latest case seems to be a combination of laziness and redneck engineering. Because three wardens busted some boaters who were in possession of some homemade fish electroshocking equipment. Yes, really.
It happened on the Red River in McCurtain County during the fourth of July weekend according to a Facebook post. Wardens Jay Harvey, Jim Gillham, and Andrew Potter were on a boat patrol when they ran across a tractor stuck in the sand with a Jon boat attached on the riverbank.
The wardens immediately realized something unusual was up because an unnamed number of suspects only had four dip nets and a cooler on the boat with them. No other fishing equipment appeared to be present. The next people to arrive on the scene made everything clear to the officers.
"Moments later a second tractor appeared from the woods and began preparing to launch two jet skis," the post reads. "One of these jet skis was rigged with illegal fish shocking equipment."
It seems the alleged poachers had hoped to stun the fish with electricity and then net them illegally. Photos of the rig posted on social media by the wardens show the extremely crude nature of the devices being used by the poachers. One of the photos appears to show the guts of an old telephone being used as a generator to produce the electricity to stun the fish and float them to the surface. The illegal nature of the device aside, it just does not seem like a particularly smart thing to do having a live wire hanging into the water like that.
The post states that the wardens ended up confiscating the redneck-engineered electrofishing equipment and issued some citations to the would-be fish poachers. It seems extremely lucky the wardens just happened to be going down the river at the right time to stop this crime in progress.
Many people noted in the comments that the poachers were likely hoping to have a large fish fry for the holiday weekend. In the laziest way possible. It makes us wonder how many times they did this prior to getting caught. Our hat is off to the wardens for stopping this crime before it could happen. Thanks for working on a holiday weekend wardens!
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For more outdoor content from Travis Smola, be sure to follow him on Twitter and check out his Geocaching and Outdoors with Travis YouTube channels.
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