CARNDUFF, Sask. — A Oxbow area veterinarian was arrested Feb. 15 for allegedly trapping and selling wild white-tailed deer.
John Philip Murray, a veterinarian and elk producer, has been charged with theft over $500. He is scheduled to appear in Carnduff Provincial Court April 17.
RCMP and Saskatchewan environment department conservation officers with stock trailers arrived at the specialty livestock operation early Feb. 15 and executed search warrants.
Provincial conservation officers seized 107 deer from the farm and transferred them to holding pens at Buffalo Pound Provincial Park near Moose Jaw, Sask.
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The value of the animals is estimated at about $270,000.
The arrest comes after a five-month investigation by Saskatchewan environment’s enforcement and compliance branch.
Conservation officers said they believe the deer are wild and were allegedly sold to specialty livestock farms as breeding stock.
Tip sparks follow-up
The investigation was prompted by a tip claiming wild deer were being trapped on a game farm near Oxbow.
“The search of the farm is just the beginning of the investigation. We have numerous leads we will follow up over the next several weeks in relation to where these deer have been going,” said Dave Harvey, enforcement officer with Saskatchewan Environment.
“We are going through the evidence and preparing other charges,” he said.
Murray is an elk producer. Harvey said the deer were in an area separate from the elk operation. There is concern about the spread of disease in the area.
“We picked up 15 dead deer at the farm and we don’t know how they died. We had Dr. Garry Wabiser, from the Western College of Veterinary Medicine, at the scene. He took the carcasses back and will be doing post-mortems on them to see why they died.”
Harvey said Murray’s veterinary drugs were documented and officials will be in touch with the veterinary licensing association.
Export concerns
SERM is concerned with the deer that were allegedly sold from the farm, and Harvey said there is evidence that some of the deer were exported to the United States.
“After going through the records it looks to me like the deer were exported to two main places in the United States. Some of the deer went to Michigan and some to Florida. Some of the deer have gone to hunt farms in the U.S.,” said Harvey. He added there is also evidence suggesting some of the deer were sold to hunt farms in Saskatchewan.
“We want to see if the people who were receiving these deer knew where they had come from. We want to check the tags and the numbers and trace everything back.
“We basically have months and months of investigating ahead of us now,” said Harvey.
Harvey said Saskatchewan environment is investigating to see if any frozen sperm or frozen embryos in Murray’s possession are from wild deer. As a veterinarian, Murray worked with cattle breeding and cattle embryo transfer.
