SOUTH TEXAS Antelope killed to stop tick spread

Officials said there was no choice but to slaughter the antelope.
BROWNSVILLE, Texas (AP) -- South Texas ranchers brought nilgai antelope from a California zoo decades ago, when it became fashionable to stock their sprawling acreage with exotic quarry.
These days the species native to India and Pakistan are not so much a rarity in South Texas as a nuisance. For cattle ranchers they are a possible nemesis, threatening to spread a deadly tick to the herds. Federal wildlife officials say the nilgai compete with native Rio Grande Valley species for food and trample the brush they are trying so hard to preserve.
The fast-running, 600-pound antelope have wandered all around the region, where at least one picked up a kind of fever tick from Mexico that once nearly wiped out American cattle. The ticks spread among the population and threaten the cattle.
Federal officials said they had no choice but to hire a "helicopter and gunner" to slaughter them. Thirty-seven were killed during the two-day hunt in March on a portion of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge that runs along the border.
"It's about the only way you can do them," said Edwin Bowers, director of field operations for the federal tick eradication program. "You can't hunt them on the ground successfully, they're extremely wary and fast and you can't get close to them. These animals can spread the ticks to places where there are cattle. We're obligated to get the ticks off of them however we can."
Fighting the tick
The USDA has been battling the tick (Boophilus microplus and Boophilus annulatus) for a century, enlisting cowboys to patrol a narrow tick eradication zone that runs about 500 miles along the eastern Texas-Mexico border.
The cowboys rope cattle and horses that may have wandered into the zone from Mexico so they can be quarantined and "dipped" for ticks. The tick has been contained in the zone since the 1940s.
The antelope cannot be similarly dipped because it's too hard to catch them.
At the turn of the 20th century, the tick wiped out 90 percent of the U.S. cattle industry with the deadly Texas Fever, said Larry Cooper, spokesman for the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.
"It was devastating," he said. "It virtually ended the old-time cattle drives."
The storied King Ranch -- at 825,000 acres the largest ranch in the United States -- first brought the nilgai to Texas and boasts its current 10,000 head as a success in game management.
Its Web site advertises hunts at 500 per gun per day plus a harvest fee of 1,000 per nilgai bull or 300 per nilgai cow.
Other Texas ranches likewise advertise "safari" hunts for those who don't want to go abroad.