Kick Ass: Selected Columns of Carl Hiaasen

by Carl Hiaasen

  The man speaks softly, just like the cooing tourists. The deer takes one tentative step toward the car. Then another.

  The brave hunter urges the deer to come, take the food from his hand. So the deer, not knowing any better, approaches the car.

  And when the animal is very close, perhaps no more than eight feet away, the brave hunter raises his rifle and fires, killing the tame quarry with one or two or even three shots.

  Since the Key deer is protected by law, and since the brave hunter is not quite brave enough to do time in a federal prison, he must be cautious. He quickly skins out the deer and finds a place in the car to conceal the venison, which is easy because there is hardly enough for steaks. Then the brave hunter escapes down U.S. 1.

  The Key deer are slowly dying off.

  Only 250 to 300 adult animals are left. Deborah Holle, manager of Key Deer Refuge on Big Pine Key, already has found 25 dead this year, most the victims of roving dogs and careless drivers—the cost of the rapid development of Big Pine.

  The poachers' toll is high but unknown, for the evidence vanishes with the culprit. The preferred weapon is a gun, though Holle says knives, bludgeons and even more ghastly methods are used to ensure a silent kill. A few months ago she picked up a discarded garbage bag and inside found a severed doe's head, one leg, a tawny hide and a man's sandal.

  Sadly, the deer are not wise enough to know the difference between a goofy camper handing out Pringles and a poacher handing out death. Rangers warn visitors not to feed the deer and signs are posted to trees, but nothing works. "For the deer's sake," Holle says, "we have to keep the wild in them."

  Two weeks ago, a pregnant doe was slaughtered after dark on nearby No Name Key. A Monroe County sheriffs deputy chased and finally stopped four men in a pickup truck.

  Three of them escaped into the mangroves, where we can only hope they were ravaged by billions of bloodthirsty mosquitoes, or worse. The Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission (1-800-452-2046) is offering $1,000 for information leading to their capture.

  The fourth man in the pickup was arrested. Authorities identified him as Gerardo Blanco, a Mariel refugee living on Stock Island in Key West. So far, he has been charged with one misdemeanor violation of the Endangered Species Act, for which he could spend a year in jail and get a $10,000 fine.

  At a hearing Blanco told a U.S. magistrate that he knew nothing of the dead doe stuffed behind the seat of the truck, or of the .22-caliber rifle allegedly used to shoot the animal at extremely close range.

  Then there was the odd matter of the carrots.

  "There were carrots in the vehicle," Deborah Holle says, fresh carrots to entice the deer.

  This is how the brave hunter works.

  Manatees still hapless victims of area boaters

  January 8, 1986

  She floated clockwise in the current.

  That she could move at all was miraculous, but every few minutes a whiskered nose poked through the surface to take a breath. She drifted in a special tank hidden from the Seaquarium's main attractions; not far away, people clapped for the killer whale show.

  Dr. Jesse White, a veterinarian, studied the manatee and said, "What amazes me is that she can still move the back of her tail. There's four, maybe six major lacerations of her back, then one big chunk. The propeller had to be at least 20 inches in circumference—that's from a Cigarette boat on up."

  The boat ran her down last Thursday in a Stuart waterway. The props shredded the animal's tail to raw pulp and tracked an awful spiral trail across her flesh. The folks who did this certainly knew—the impact would have been comparable to smashing a 900-pound log. Yet they sped away, leaving the young manatee spinning in a cloud of her own blood.

  Amazingly, she was able to swim, and for some reason went south. By late Friday she made it under the Kobe Sound Bridge; by Saturday morning, Jupiter Inlet. At dusk Sunday she was spotted offshore at Juno Beach.

  By dawn Monday she lay dying in the warm waters of Florida Power & Light's Riviera Beach power station. She had traveled more than 30 miles before the Florida Marine Patrol and rescue workers could get a net on her. By this time she was too weak to struggle.

  Back at the Seaquarium, Dr. White cut away strips of dead and rotting flesh. Using a seven-inch needle, he gave the manatee two enormous injections of antibiotics. Afterward the doctor stood by the tank and stared at the wounds. "Damn," he said, under his breath.

  The seasonal slaughter has begun. Cold weather has driven the slow-moving sea cows to warm water, where mindless boaters run them down. Last week three manatees in South Florida were killed this way.

  You'd have to live under a rock not to know better. Jimmy Buffett sings songs and Gov. Graham goes on TV, and warning signs are posted throughout the inland waterways. The law is tough and the fine for speeding in protected waters is steep, averaging $119.

  Still, boatloads of morons don't care. Go out any Sunday and watch them tear through the cooling canal at Port Everglades.

  Sgt. Royce Hamilton of the Marine Patrol helped with the Riviera Beach rescue. This time of year he writes a lot of tickets to boaters speeding through manatee zones.

  "We've had people tell us that manatees are like dinosaurs, and nobody misses them. We get that all the time. I had an attorney who I arrested last year who said he hadn't seen a manatee in five years. As I was writing the ticket one surfaced right by his boat! That shut him down real fast."

  It would be easy to blame the snowbirds for the mayhem against the manatees, but Hamilton said this is not fair. Most of those arrested, he noted, are year-round Florida residents, "the ones who should have the most concern."

  At the Seaquarium, Dr. White pointed at the drifting manatee and said, "The third cut is so deep it hit the spinal cord longitudinally … the only wounds I've seen worse than this are on dead animals."

  Up close she looks as if she's been chewed by a threshing machine. Odds of survival: "Very slim."

  Somehow the manatee made it through Monday night. On Tuesday morning she got another jolt of antibiotics. Dr. White talked more hopefully of saving the animal and including her in the Seaquarium's captive breeding program, saying, "We keep putting babies back in the world to take the place of the ones they keep killing."

  Next month the first captive bred-and-born manatees, named Sunrise and Savannah, will be released into the Homosassa River.

  The Seaquarium's newest manatee has no name. Dr. White said it was too soon for that. It's a lesson he's learned over the years—if you name them right away, it hurts even more to watch them die.

  A loud cry for the state's wild panther

  Septembers, 1988

  Last summer, in a pine hammock north of the Big Cypress Swamp, a rare Florida panther was released to the wild.

  The big charcoal cat, known as No. 20, had been hit by a pickup, rescued and nursed back to health. To those of us who watched it dash into the wilderness, the animal looked awesomely fit and unconquerable.

  But two weeks ago, the radio collar around No. 20's neck emitted an alarm from a device known as a mortality switch. The signal meant that the panther had not moved its head in several hours. No. 20 lay dead in the scrub.

  Experts were deeply worried. Within days, three wild panthers would die from a population of only a few dozen. Another captive animal would die of liver disease. Tom Logan of the Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission: "When you're dealing with low numbers to start with, any loss makes you pucker up a bit."

  The deadly streak began in mid-June, when the only breeding female in Everglades National Park was found lifeless. Panther No. 15 had recently given birth, but the kittens were missing. It is believed they were killed by a predator, possibly a male panther.

  A necropsy noted wounds on the female's forearms, but the cause of death remains unknown.

  Another collared panther was struck by a car near Homestead and suffered a severely broken leg. A juvenile found starving on an island near Shark River was flown to Gainesv
ille for emergency treatment. Both cats are recovering, but it is not certain when, or if, they can be safely freed again.

  Outside the park, August was the killer month. No. 24, a 126-pound male that roamed Highlands County, died for reasons that will never be known. A faulty mortality switch on its collar prevented biologists from finding the body before it decomposed.

  Days later, another young male cat, No. 25, died near Alligator Alley after being badly bitten in a fight with another panther. The wounds resulted in a bacterial infection that raced fatally to the animal's heart.

  Before the tests, though, state game officials wondered if it could be more than grim coincidence that so many panthers were dying in such a short time. "A very bad week," said biologist Sonny Bass. Experts speculated about a mystery virus.

  So far, there is no evidence of it. Tom Logan believes a combination of things contributed to the death of No. 20 near Immokalee. The animal had a heart murmur, first diagnosed after the truck accident. While in captivity, the cat also broke all its canine teeth, which veterinarians painstakingly recapped before its release.

  But the dental caps came off in the wild, making it difficult for the panther to take large prey such as deer and wild hogs. No. 20 had lost 33 pounds in the months before it died.

  The deaths have rekindled the debate over the state's radio tracking program, with critics suggesting that the collars inhibit breeding and possibly harm the cats.

  Bass, Logan and others disagree. Radio telemetry has enabled rescuers to locate several panthers that had been struck by cars and would have died without help. As for the mating cycles, biologists have tracked one family of collared cats through three prolific generations.

  Already in peril, the panther's future would seem especially bleak after such a bad summer: six animals (four dead, two injured) removed from a total wild population that might not exceed 30.

  Yet state biologists are not ready to panic. Far-ranging and fiercely territorial, the panther is subject to a natural mortality, even among younger animals. When two cats meet and battle in the wild, there is nothing that man can do.

  "These losses appear to be tragic," Tom Logan says, "but they really are a part of what goes on."

  Where there is death in the Big Cypress, there is also hope for life. Panther watchers are currently tracking three separate litters of healthy kittens—and hoping that enough of them will survive to carry on the species.

  Watering down of rules throws sharks to wolves

  December 24, 1992

  One of the great indoor sports for Floridians is browsing our souvenir shops, to see what tourists are buying.

  Once I found a shark embryo in a jar. No joke: A store in Key West had an entire shelf of real shark embryos, bottled like dill pickles. This was promoted as a clever memento of one's tropical vacation.

  These days you won't find so many baby sharks, on land or sea. We've done quite a job of slaughtering them.

  Some of the killing occurs in the name of sport, because shark are fine game fish. Ernest Hemingway sometimes machine-gunned his initials into their heads. As a kid, I killed a few myself, though not so exuberantly.

  In those days we never dreamed the ocean would run out of sharks, but that's what is happening. The big money is in the fins, which are sold in Asia for expensive sharkfin soup.

  It's an obscene reason to annihilate the planet's most important wild predator. Without sharks, the complex ecology of the sea will go haywire. This year Florida adopted a good law stopping commercial shark fishing within the three-mile state waters. It also limited the sharks taken by recreational anglers to one per day. (Some days, you'd be lucky to see that many.)

  The U.S. government became so alarmed by the decline of sharks that it proposed similar restrictions in national waters, up to 200 miles offshore. It also sought to ban the barbaric practice of "finning"—hacking the fins off live sharks and tossing their maimed bodies overboard.

  Weeks before the shark rules were to become law, a campaigning-President Bush announced a 9o-day moratorium on all new federal regulations. Now, with the election over, the National Marine Fisheries Service has presented a revised shark plan, which goes into effect in January. It's not nearly as tough as the original.

  "An unmitigated disaster," says Dr. Sam Gruber, a University of Miami biologist who's been studying sharks since 1960.

  Though live finning is outlawed, the new guidelines still allow commercial fishermen to take 2,436 metric tons of coastal sharks annually—lemon, bull, tiger, nurse and several other species. Each recreational boat can kill four.

  "It's a joke," says Gruber. "It legalizes the wholesale slaughter of these things, for no reason."

  The fisheries service insists the regulations will reduce the harvest enough that shark populations will resurge. Some marine biologists are skeptical. Unlike most fish, sharks take years to mature, and reproduce in small numbers. It worked for 4 million centuries, but not so well in the last decade.

  Gruber has watched the change. In 1986, he began studying the life cycles of 140 lemon sharks in a secluded bight near No Name Key. The next year, only 90 of the sharks remained. By 1989, all were gone.

  Divers and charter captains report similar observations along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Some commercial boats have gone out of business or moved to North Carolina, where sharks migrate in concentrations along the continental shelf.

  Sure, sharks have a PR problem. Bumblebees kill more humans, but sharks get the bad press. And TV is always a sucker for dockside footage of a dead Great White, rotting ferociously in the sun.

  Scary or not, sharks play a critical role in keeping the seas bountiful. It's not easy to kill off a creature that's survived 400 million years, but we've found a way. The rich folk do like their soup.

  Meanwhile, I'm steering clear of tourist shops, in case somebody gets the bright idea for manatee steak.

  A regular at saloon, popularity killed her

  April 6, 1995

  "El Presidente" died last week. Bullet in the head.

  Those who loved her might have loved her too well.

  El Presidente was an alligator who lived by the Last Chance Saloon in Florida City. She was eight feet long, half-blind, a favorite with bar patrons.

  They thought she was a male, hence the nickname. Attempts at gender verification were deemed unwise.

  Laura Dryer, who runs the Last Chance, says El Presidente was a fixture for 12 years. Never bothered anybody but the garfish.

  Wildlife officers say she had become a threat because people came to feed her in the canal, which flanks busy U.S. 1. They feared a tourist or small child would tumble down the bank and get chomped.

  Two citizen complaints were filed with the state Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission. Lawmen visited the scene.The verdict: El Presidente had to go.

  "It met every criteria for a dangerous nuisance alligator," says Todd Hardwick, the man assigned to the capture. "It was 10 feet from U.S. 1, and a few feet from a bar where people were drinking."

  One-eyed alligators and bleary-eyed partiers probably ought not to commingle, but through the years El Presidente and her fond admirers had no problems.

  However, once branded a "nuisance," she was doomed. In gator-rich Florida, only the small ones are relocated. The large ones are harvested, because transfers are costly and often fruitless.

  Recently a beloved alligator named Grandpa, in a rare clemency, was moved from Big Pine Key to Homosassa Springs. Bitten and abused by resident gators, Grandpa soon died.

  So El Presidente received the customary sentence: death.

  Hardwick, well-known capturer and rescuer of wild critters, holds the state trapper license for Dade and Monroe. He and two assistants got the call March 30 from Game and Fish.

  Snagged with a fishing rod, El Presidente proved more manageable than her fans at the Last Chance. "They were ready to lynch me," Hardwick says.

  Game officers prevented Dryer and others from blocking the captur
e. Mouth taped, the gator was hauled away and quickly killed with a .22. In this way, 4,632 nuisance gators were taken last year. The sale of the skin, at a state auction, is the trapper's fee.

  Laura Dryer is heartsick and angry about El Presidente. "There was no justification for them to pull it out of the water and shoot it!"

  Says Lt. Jeff Ardelean of Game and Fish: "They signed its death warrant by feeding it."

  Indeed, El Presidente was one well-nourished saurian. At her death, she weighed 270 pounds. "Obese," says Hardwick. "The fattest eight-foot-four alligator we ever saw."

  The girth of her tail was a Limbaughesque 32 inches, compared to the usual 18 or 19 inches of a gator that length.

  Dryer says she didn't see throngs of people feeding El Presidente. She said the canal is teeming with fish, turtles and other natural cuisine upon which the gator gorged, though it's possible that customers donated high-calorie table scraps.

  Inside the Last Chance Saloon, black armbands are worn in El Presidente's memory. Mourners don T-shirts denouncing the state: "Environmentally Protected, My Ass." There's even talk of a motorcycle run, to protest the killing.

  Because of death threats, Todd Hardwick's house was put under police watch. Unaccustomed to the role of villain, he says he truly understands why people are upset.

  It's easy to become attached to animals, even a crusty one-eyed alligator. Sadly, in these risky relationships, it's usually the reptile who winds up getting hurt.

  Wildlife losing their homes as we build ours

  December 12, 1996

  One day late in November, travelers on U.S. 27 in western Broward County saw an unusual sight: a wild bobcat walking dazed in broad daylight along the busy highway.