Cousins Arrested for Illegal Hog Hunt After Showing Up to Retrieve their Impounded Dog 🐕

I’m currently at the “it’s Thursday already?” phase of the workweek and am unsure as to whether or not that is a good thing as of yet.

With that in mind, let’s all take a minute to grab a coffee or whiskey (no judgement) and get this Thursday morning dispatch out the door.

Here's what's worth reading about today:

SNAPCHATTING THEIR WAY TO AN ARREST
COUSINS ARRESTED FOR ILLEGAL HOG HUNT AFTER SHOWING UP TO RETRIEVE THE IMPOUNDED DOG THEY ABANDONED

In what ranks as one of the more efficient self-sabotages in recent Florida wildlife crime history, two cousins managed to get arrested for trespassing largely because they couldn’t resist trying to bail out the very dog they ditched while fleeing the scene.

After deciding that a fenced private cattle ranch would make an excellent uninvited playground for feral hog pursuits, Gavin Keith Dasher, 30, and his 18-year-old cousin Gracin Randell Dasher-Richardson quickly found out that the property owner disagreed. Unfortunately for our late-night hunters, so did the sheriff’s deputies who, tipped off to previous trespasses, quietly set up surveillance cameras…

🦒 $5,000 Reward for Missing Giraffe on the Loose in Texas Hill Country. In quintessential Texas fashion, a giraffe named Gracie has gone missing from Cedar Hollow Ranch in Real County, and locals are turning the Texas Hill Country upside down to find her.

The roughly week-and-a-half-old escape (she slipped through a high-game fence) has the ranch owners and search teams using drones, helicopters, game cameras, and boots on the ground across rugged terrain. Gracie was last confirmed via trail cam west of Leakey, and despite scattered sightings, she still remains at large.

Her owner has since sweetened the deal with a $5,000 reward for information leading to her safe capture and return. Anyone who spots the distinctive round-eared giraffe (ignore pointy-eared ones) is asked to contact ranch manager Vick Jones at 830-279-5822 or the Real County Sheriff’s Office at 830-232-5201.

🙏 Autopsy Confirms Suicide in Disappearance of 27 Year Old Colorado Turkey Hunter. The death of Kaden Sites, a 27-year-old turkey hunter from Salida, who went missing in mid-April during a solo hunt has been ruled a suicide by the El Paso County Coroner's Office. 

Sites was reported missing after failing to attend a scheduled doctor’s appointment on April 15th. His body was later recovered following an extensive 11-day search on Mount Shavano, roughly 1.5 miles from where his truck was parked at the Blanks Cabin Trailhead, with his phone left inside and battery dead.

Our thoughts and prayers remain with Sites’ family and friends.

🫎 New Study Challenges Moose Status in Colorado Suggesting They Were Native All Along. A new study out of the University of Colorado Boulder is shaking up decades of wildlife management assumptions in the state. Researchers, drawing on old newspaper archives, historical photographs, archaeological bones, and Indigenous oral traditions, argue that moose were present and breeding in Colorado’s Southern Rocky Mountains long before the official 1978 reintroduction effort.

Evidence includes multiple accounts of mother moose with calves, a 1912 photo of a cow and juvenile near Fairplay, and traditional knowledge from Arapaho and Ute peoples showing long familiarity with the animal. While the population has grown to around 3,500 today and is impacting some ecosystems, the “non-native invasive” label long used to justify culling or heavy management now may no longer hold up.

🧐 "That’s Absolutely Crazy" – Montana Gov. Gianforte Blasts Oregon Effort to Ban Hunting and Fishing. Montana Governor Greg Gianforte isn’t pulling any punches on a growing Oregon ballot initiative that would effectively outlaw licensed hunting, fishing, trapping, and related activities by removing animal cruelty law exemptions. In a new video, the governor called it straight: “They are literally trying to outlaw hunting and fishing – that’s absolutely crazy.”

Noting that hunting and fishing are central to Montana’s heritage and way of life, Gianforte closed with a blunt statement: “To all those Oregonians who want to outlaw hunting and fishing, please stay out of Montana.”

Watch the governor’s video here. 

🦈 We’ve got flying Mako Sharks! Watch as these boys and girls get a wicked show as a good-sized Mako shark makes a leap for it.

Pretty rad…

⛵️ Son of a Son of a Sailor: My grandfather served in the Navy, and when I was young, he carried the ocean with him even on dry land. He had that way about him—quiet, steady, like a man who had already seen enough to know what mattered and what didn’t. When he spoke, it was worth listening to.

He used to tell me stories about life on a submarine. Not the kind you’d expect …

No dramatics, no explosions, no grand heroics. Just small, human details. The way time stretched when you were submerged for days. The strange intimacy of living shoulder to shoulder with other men in a steel tube beneath the sea. And sometimes, he said, they played chess.

Chess, hundreds of feet underwater. Read the full story.

🐈‍⬛ The Devil of Bangalore: The night was warm and still and, although there was no moon, the myriad stars cast a bright glow over the village as the hunter took his position outside one of the huts. He had just arrived in the Bangalore region of southern India where he was waiting for one of the country’s most cunning man-eating leopards.

The leopard had been terrorizing the occupants of several villages for quite a while. Making almost nightly visits, the unbelievably clever cat had managed to kill some 42 people, always escaping unseen. The villagers trembled in fear behind locked doors as one neighbor after another had been dragged screaming from their homes by the deadly panther.  Read the full story.

🎣 Topwater in the Thunderdome : The windows are rolled down, my sunglasses on. I smell barbecue in smokers, hear the gentle slosh of half-melted ice from the cooler in the trunk whenever I brake. A pair of hemos on an elastic lanyard bobs from the rearview mirror. It’s sunny with perfect fast-moving clouds, 87°, bright and muggy, another sweaty summer in Alabama. Turn up the Bob Marley.

A fully-rigged fiberglass 9-weight jitters alongside my head, the rest of it running all the way through the folded-down backseat to the trunk, where the large-arbor reel is balanced in a pair of stinky wading boots. I always reel out extra line and forgo the hook seat, preferring to wrap my leader around the curvature of the reel and hook the fly on an upper eyelet somewhere in the middle of the rod – saves the leader from kinking, and I can be lazy about taking apart my rods. I clearly see the fly itself, which is a hand-tied (not by me) gurgler variant, shaved off a wine cork. Read the full story.

Oh, and one more thing…