R.T. Stewart, an undercover wildlife law enforcement officer, worked with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources in the Division of Wildlife to make sure poachers stayed away for good. With the help of  W.H Gross, who serves as Stewart’s biographer, Poachers Were My Prey: Eighteen Years as an Undercover Wildlife Officer  came to life. In his book, Stewart invites us to follow him through 10 of his undercover poaching investigations. 

Drawing on his undercover work, Stewart gives us a firsthand account of what life was like in a poaching ring (or groups). While many poachers have their hunting license, this mainly works to cover-up their illegal activity. Poachers go over their legal catch limits for the hunting season, resulting in hundreds of animals being illegally killed. 

The book starts with Stewart’s first investigation in the spring of 1992. He was targeting two groups, one of which was named “The Clan”. This led to the investigation being called “Operation Clanbake”. Finding a key characteristic of the investigation and naming it after that trait was how naming for most investigations worked back then. This resulted in some humorous (maybe, slightly offensive i.e Operation Stirfry) operation names during Stewart’s career. 

  R.T uses Operation Clanbake to introduce important  legal terminology. He tells us about predisposition, which means that “a suspect does or says something that leads an undercover officer to determine that they have broken the law before the officer ever becomes involved with the suspect”. Having suspects predispose themselves was extremely important because R.T wanted to avoid entrapment – when a suspect says that an undercover officer has placed the thought of an illegal action in their head that they wouldn’t have had otherwise. These two terms help explain a lot of R.T’s approaches to talking with poachers. 

 The suspects in Operation Clanbake predisposed themselves by bragging about their numerous deer kills without Stewart prompting them. He would butter the suspects up by talking about a common interest, like hunting or cars, and soon enough they’d be telling him about their poaching business. This was his go-to strategy throughout his 10 operations. He found it easier to get poachers to open up when they felt connected.

 Stewart talks about how being undercover and taking on a completely different identity really affects your mindset. For the most part, the poacher’s in Stewart’s investigations were not pleasant characters. That makes  it easy to root for their downfall. 

Operation Redbud proved to be different. In 1995, Stewart went undercover as Bob Thomas for over a year to investigate wild turkey poachers. To his surprise, he formed a deep friendship with one of his targets, Claude Maxwell. Maxwell was a man who treated his family well and seemed reasonable, his only flaw seemed to be poaching. Throughout Operation Redbud, Stewart found himself feeling guilty, knowing he’d have to take Maxwell down, despite seeing him as a real friend. Poachers were people too and at the end of day some of them needed to make a living. 

 Stewart found that many poachers who poached animals, like deer or turkey, mainly did it for the money and an added ego boost. Good aim and high kill counts earned respect in poaching rings. Poachers often lived in poor areas, where the cost of living wasn’t too high, and more often than not they abused some kind of drug like cocaine or marijuana. Poaching was enough to sustain their livelihoods since a deer carcass could go for anywhere between $20-80. While this may not seem like much because poachers were frequently getting kills, they made just enough to survive. 

This was a stark contrast to the poachers involved in Operation Cornerstone. In the early 2000s, these poachers targeted yellow perch — a common fish found in Lake Erie — for a quick buck. The perch were sold for  around 7-8$ a pound. The poachers in Operation Cornerstone were very well-off, had equipment worth thousands of dollars, and lived in beautiful houses. They enjoyed the high from illegal killings and stealing from other landowners. This proved that not all poachers were just trying to get by, some just did not want to respect wildlife laws. During this time, punishments for poaching consisted of a small fine (a couple of hundreds) when poachers got caught. To big shot poachers like these, the fine was just something they paid and laughed about. Stewart wanted to increase these fines and get poachers to face jail time. 

Poacher’s Were My Prey offers fascinating insight into modern day poaching rings. Stewart shows us that fighting for wildlife protection is time consuming and mentally taxing, but must be done to keep poachers at bay. Even if you can’t become an undercover agent, reporting suspicious behavior can help wildlife officers catch poachers. While holding poachers accountable is extremely important, the solution to stopping poaching doesn’t just end when people are sent off to jail. Stewart’s book gets us to recognize that the issue of poaching is a very dynamic issue that is both human and animal oriented.