‘Ghost Deer’ Suspect Faked Deaths, Tried To Sell Black Market Bucks: Court Docs
Ken Schlaudt, a former leader of the Texas Deer Association, faces multiple charges in a sweeping investigation into Texas wildlife crime.
In March of last year, Ken Schlaudt, a prominent deer breeder and game ranch owner in Texas, allegedly reached out to another individual and offered to sell some deer.
But there was a catch. Schlaudt had already reported several of the deer as dead to state wildlife authorities and the sale would remain "off the books," according to an affidavit for his arrest warrant in Travis County. Schlaudt wanted $65,000 for the animals, the affidavit says.
Schlaudt's alleged attempt to report captive deer as dead and then sell them on the black market is the highest-profile case so far in what Texas wildlife officials say is a wide-ranging conspiracy to evade rules meant to curb the spread of chronic wasting disease, or CWD. The “ghost deer investigation” has led to the arrest of 24 suspects, who face charges for some 1,400 crimes — including trafficking live deer without permits and killing wild ones to submit their lymph nodes in the place of dead captive deer.
Until news of his arrest in April was made public earlier this month, Schlaudt had served as the Region 1 Director for the Texas Deer Association, the voice of the state's deer breeding lobby.
The investigation has brought unflattering attention to Texas deer breeders, a small but profitable segment of the hunting industry that pen-raises deer to maximize antler growth, then releases bucks onto high-fenced game ranches for paying customers to shoot. Bucks with elaborate and often unusually shaped antlers can fetch prices stretching into the tens of thousands of dollars.
Since 2021 a series of unexplained cases of CWD have broken out at more than two dozen breeding facilities across the state, raising concerns that captive deer may spread the disease to free-ranging deer.
Like mad cow disease in cattle or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, CWD is a contagious disorder that causes brain proteins called "prions" to misfold, causing death by neurodegeneration. Most wildlife biologists consider the disease an urgent threat to the country's herds of cervids — a family of animals that includes deer, elk, moose and caribou.
The state of Texas has taken aggressive steps to contain the outbreak at breeder pens, generally killing all deer at infected sites and prohibiting deer farming operations there for at least five years.
Those aggressive containment measures have created high stakes for breeders, some of whom have gone to drastic lengths to skirt the rules, Texas officials say.
Schlaudt declined an interview request for this article, but denied smuggling wild deer in a comment to Meateater. His ranch manager, Bill Bowers, also denied smuggling deer in a Facebook post. “It will all come out like it’s supposed to,” Bowers wrote, “no one here is or has smuggled deer.”
Schlaudt owns multiple breeding pens, along with the Rockin S Ranch — a 1,500-acre game ranch outside San Angelo that holds some 30 species of mostly exotic big game animals like zebra, mouflon and nilgai, as well as whitetail deer.
"We at Rockin S are steadily expanding our whitetail breeding facilities and herd," Schlaudt's website reads. "We strive for big, beautiful typicals. Our premium does are bred with top name sires and will be producing some powerful fawns this coming fawning season."
Texas game wardens inspected Schlaudt's breeding pens in Tom Green County in November of last year, after learning about the alleged black market sale, according to the affidavit.
After scanning radio frequency identification devices inserted into the animals’ ears, officers say they identified 11 deer already reported as dead. None of the tags dangling from the animals' ears matched the scanned ID numbers issued by the state.
Texas wildlife officials had asked Schlaudt to kill those 11 specific deer and test them for CWD, according to the warrant. At least one of Schaudt’s facilities had lost the ability to move deer off site, which typically happens when a breeding pen or game ranch receives deer from a facility found to have been exposed to CWD. Losing "movement qualification" can deal a major blow to a business typically based on selling captive deer to game ranches.
Texas A&M University received lymph nodes and brainstems for CWD testing that supposedly belonged to the deer standing before the officers at the time of inspection, raising questions about which deer were killed to harvest those tissues.
A search of Schlaudt's phone revealed conversations about falsely reporting deaths of captive deer with his ranch manager Bill Bowers, according to the warrant.
"Multiple text messages show that Schlaudt is not just an 'in and out' ranch owner," the arrest affidavit says. Schlaudt wrote one message telling Bowers that "if anything happens to any deer while loading, just substitute another that we have reported dead," the affidavit says. In another, Schlaudt allegedly told Bower to call someone to discuss deer "he wants unofficially."
Schlaudt and Bowers both face charges for tampering with government records, a state felony punishable by up to two years in prison. The Texas legislature increased penalties for repeatedly falsifying CWD tests earlier this year, though that law had not taken effect by the time the two men were charged.
The two men also face more than 100 misdemeanor charges in Tom Green County related to illegal deer breeder activities, according to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.