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Contract Killing

For a few thousand dollars, he'll be your living-room decoration.

By Lisa Rab 

Outside the lodge at World Class Whitetails, there's only stillness. Here in Millersburg, among the velvet hills and serenity of Amish country, time slows down. Beyond the high wire fence protecting the grassy ranch, you can make out a few eyes glinting from a patch of woods. The deer are grazing, entirely unconcerned.

Finally, the growl of a motor reaches the lodge. The combination jeep/golf cart that ferries customers around this hunting preserve is returning with a full load. Kevin Smoker drove up from Alabama yesterday to give his two teenage sons their birthday presents: trophy kills. The biggest buck the boys have ever seen is now lying in the back of the cart, a bright froth of blood ringing its mouth.

As a guide named Bud wipes away the crimson, World Class owner Dan Yoder orders the hunters back to the field for pictures. Make it look more natural, he says. So they trundle out to the grass and heave the enormous carcass onto the ground. Bud tells 16-year-old Sage Smoker to pick up the deer's head by its antlers and pose.

"Smile, young man. You got a beautiful deer there."

Forget your grandfather's version of hunting — waking up before dawn, trudging into freezing darkness, trying to cover your scent as you wait hours to spot a buck. This is hunting in the Wii Age, where fast, wall-mount-caliber kills are the goal. If you are willing to pay anywhere from $3,000 to $20,000, you can bag the trophy of a lifetime.

World Class is among 27 licensed hunting preserves in Ohio. Most of these privately owned ranches are concentrated in the southern part of the state, catering to men with money to burn.

In a sense, they're much like conventional farms. Owners raise their own deer or buy the best bucks and semen from other farmers. By the time the deer are released into the fenced-in preserve, they bear more resemblance to purebred horses than wild animals.

The goal is to provide an endless supply of trophy bucks — proud, barrel-chested beasts with crowns of elaborate antlers that can stretch two feet wide and rise in sculptured patterns. Though racks like theirs appear more often in reindeer movies than in the wild, genetic manipulation makes them a common reality on the preserves, producing young deer whose antlers are bigger than any mature buck's naturally grow.

Consider it an equalizing of nature's odds. Young hunters spend their childhoods listening to Dad and his buddies brag of the magnificent creatures they bagged in their day. Having those antlers on your wall serves as testament to your skill and patience as a hunter. But encountering a buck like this in the wild might happen once in 30 years. So some hunters find it's worth the shortcut to hunt on a preserve, where the trophy has no escape.

At World Class Whitetails, a 200-acre ranch that once housed a sawmill, Yoder even guarantees his hunts. Either you take home a deer, or your only cost is a $500 deposit for lodging.

When a new batch of hunters arrives, their first task is picking a target, much as you'd select a dog at the pet store. They ride out to a little shack that smells like freshly cut wood, from which they have a clear view of the landscape. Hunters can spend hours sitting in canvas folding chairs, peering through their binoculars.

The decision is all about price. The width and style of a buck's antlers determine whether he costs $3,000 or $8,000. Sometimes the biggest challenge is just keeping track of the buck you want. If you shoot the wrong one, you can end up paying a lot more than you bargained for.

It helps that there are plenty of people raising deer to support the preserve population. Deer farming began in the Amish community, where farmers accustomed to raising cows and sheep found a new, ripe market. Today, there are more than 500 deer farms in Ohio.

"Just like dog breeding and horse breeding, right now breeding for trophy racks is unbelievably huge," says Dennis Malloy, a field director for the national conservation group Whitetails Unlimited.

Big-antlered bucks can sell for $38,000, a straw of their semen for $4,000, according to Yoder's ads. "It's pretty astounding what you will see people paying," says Lindsay Thomas Jr. of the Quality Deer Management Association in Georgia.

Yet to Steve Garrison, a hunter from Tennessee and loyal customer at World Class, it's all driven by a very simple concept: "Everybody wants to kill a monster deer."

Why this is happening depends on whom you ask. Some will tell you that hunting is slowly returning to its European roots as a province of the rich. In the past, hunters could knock on a farmer's door and ask to hunt his land. But as America's population becomes more suburbanized, fewer hunters know any farmers. And in the Golden Age of Litigation, farmers are reluctant to let strangers shoot up their land.

So if you're from out of town, you may have little choice but to sign up with a guide or pay thousands to lease the opportunity to hunt private land. Some outfits charge $2,500 for five days of meals, lodging, and guided hunting.

"The amount of privately held land where you can hunt easily has dropped significantly," says Jeff Davis, a Wisconsin hunter and spokesman for Whitetails Unlimited. "It's making it real difficult for an average guy to go out and hunt."

Meanwhile, the deer season for gun-hunting on public property in Ohio lasts less than two weeks, and it could take days to stalk a buck that makes the trip worthwhile. And public lands are becoming increasingly crowded.

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