Inside the Growing and Controversial World of Wildlife-Killing Contests

L
uke Cowan switches off the safety of his .204-caliber rifle. The single shot rings out and then a thump as the animal hits the ground. At just 25, Cowan’s hair has grayed, but he still retains a boyish face pinkened by years of hunting under the Texas sun. Wearing a trucker hat and thin camouflage hoodie, he walks into the brush and scoops up the dead fox with ease. Back at the UTV, he holds it out to his hunting buddies, Jaden Randall and Sean Moyer. Blood drips from its wounded chest onto Cowan’s index finger, leaving a stain he doesn’t bother to wipe off.

He opens the fox’s jaw so the guys can regard its sharp little teeth. 

“They can terrorize some shit,” Randall says. 

Cowan tosses his first fox of the day into the bed of Moyer’s brand-new Lone Star Can-Am, and the guys clamber back in. They bump up and down the rocky hills hoping to cover about 3,000 acres of private property outside Uvalde. But this isn’t just a regular hunting trip — they’re participating in a 24-hour predator-killing contest hosted by Randall and Moyer’s hunting company, Smoke ‘Em Outdoors, called the SEO Varmint Roundup. 

Killing contests are big business in Texas. Randall, 29, and Moyer, 27, started theirs in 2018 to get the younger generation involved in hunting (they host a youth-only contest every spring), to spread the word about SEO, and to help landowners with predator control, a controversial take in wildlife management circles and among some game hunters. Like other predator hunters, Moyer and Randall stress that the contests are a form of conservation — the idea that “managing” predators allows game species to survive (a boon for future hunts) and limits livestock depredations. “We don’t do this for shits and giggles,” says Moyer, who is married to one of Randall’s sisters (Cowan once dated her twin). But as retired National Parks Service superintendent Mike Finley, a hunter, says, “To be frank, that’s bullshit.” Research has shown the opposite of what Moyer and Randall believe: that killing large numbers of coyotes could disrupt the predator ecosystem and lead to population and depredation increases.

In similar contests around the country, hundreds of animals might be killed. (Opponents call these events wildlife-killing contests, while the hunters themselves refer to them as predator-hunting contests.) Undercover investigators for the Humane Society of the United States documented 405 coyotes killed at the 2023 Nuggets Night Vision Coyote Hunt in Illinois; 590 at the 2022 Eastern U.S. Predator Calling Championship in Virginia; and 315 coyotes and foxes at the 2021 Kanawha Valley Predator Calling Championship, also in Virginia. 

Numbers vary widely, but Texas is believed to host more contests than any other state (estimates range from 60 to 600 a year; Moyer on the SEO podcast mused the number to be closer to 1,000). Among dozens of others, popular ones include the monthlong Wise County Hog Contest, the Rough Country Big Gray Fox Contest, and The West Texas Big Bobcat Contest, billed as the “highest-paying hunting contest in the country.” Only about 25 teams participated when it began in 2008, according to co-founder Jeremy Harrison. Now its January, February, and March contests draw almost 2,000 teams and hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money. This year the contest paid out more than $421,000 to various winners and has doled out almost $4 million overall.

The rules for each contest vary, but typically the teams that bring in the heaviest predators win the main money pot. There are often side pots for, say, the most gray fox, bobcats, coyotes, raccoons, squirrels, or other animals classified as “varmints” that don’t have bag limits or hunting seasons. Coyotes, for example, can be killed year-round in most states in the U.S. without limits. Some animals killed at the contests might be sold to fur buyers or taxidermied while others might be discarded. Undercover Humane Society investigators once found coyotes in the dumpster after a New York contest. Randall tells me they bury the animals they don’t use. “Nobody eats foxes or coyotes,” he says. 

At each new spot, Moyer parks the Can-Am and climbs onto the high rack, a handmade platform in the bed with two swiveling boat chairs for a perched, 360-degree view. The landowner had earlier marveled at the piece of handiwork. “If you don’t get any, you can’t blame it on your equipment,” he says. Cowan joins Moyer while Randall sets out the spinning decoy and electronic caller, a loudspeaker that emits the cries of white-tailed jackrabbits, cottontails, birds, coyote pups and other animals. From the high rack, Moyer selects various sounds — a crippled jaybird, a fox in distress — from the remote control slung around his neck.

They wait. Randall leans against the vehicle and chews a toothpick. Every so often he lifts his SEO trucker hat to rake a hand through his strawberry-hued hair, curled into a sweaty lick at the nape of his neck. Sometimes he gestures silently to the guys to indicate he sees movement. Everything is quiet except the torturous, repetitive wail of the caller. Cowan and Moyer turn slowly in their chairs, their guns aimed like two submarine scopes. Though it’s a cloudless 73-degree day, conditions aren’t on their side. “It’s windy as shit,” says Randall at one point.

For hours, Cowan is the only one to kill. He shoots the second gray fox in the head. The third one behind the shoulder. Moyer and Randall jokingly call him “the predator god.”

“I think shootin’ fox is just about as much fun as you can have with your clothes on,” he said on an episode of their podcast.

At the eleventh spot, Randall — who hasn’t taken a shot — starts to get frustrated. The sun sets behind the mesquite and turns the sky pastel. Randall takes the truck and goes for a Domino’s run. They haven’t eaten since 10 a.m., when they each ordered chicken enchiladas for lunch at a Mexican restaurant in town. The guys now scarf their slices standing up while their headlamps beam in the dark. Moyer changes into a fleece jumpsuit in anticipation of the cold night ahead. Then they’re off again — Moyer at the wheel — through a metal gate and into a neighboring private property.

Cowan shoots two more foxes. Moyer shoots his first fox of the contest with a .223-caliber AR-style rifle, a semi-automatic also used by the military. Randall had warned that things “get crazy at night,” but by 10:30 p.m., they still haven’t killed what they wanted.

“I wish we’d get a coyote,” he says from the back seat of the UTV, pronouncing it “kie-ote.” 

The night wears on and the air chills under the dome of a thousand stars. They kill a few more foxes and a raccoon. The bed of the Can-Am piles up with bloodied carcasses. At around 3 a.m., they call it quits. They leave the property, drive back to the dove hunting lodge where they’re staying, and trudge inside the unlocked side door to get a few hours sleep in the bunk room. In the morning they have to drive three hours northwest to Rosanky, Texas, near Moyer and Randall’s hometown. The qualifying teams will congregate there to see whose animals weigh the most for the more than $2,000 grand prize.

THE RISING POPULARITY OF KILLING CONTESTS has stirred up a culture war among hunters over questions of fair chase and what it means to be an ethical hunter. Some game hunters are even at the forefront of the fight to stop these competitions.

“It’s wanton killing,” says Finley, who backed a ban in Oregon while chairing the state’s fish and wildlife commission. “You can’t justify it.”

Today’s predator contests have deep, colonial roots in American history that date back to the frontier days of bounty hunting. The current form — 24-hour (or longer) competitions that prize body count in exchange for cash or hunting swag — seems to have gained traction only since the turn of this century, when recovery projects for gray and Mexican wolves began under the Endangered Species Act and the federal assault weapons ban expired in 2004. Since then, contests have cropped up by the dozens in rural areas around the country put on by local fire departments, 4-H chapters, and major hunting outfitters. 

Now, owing in large part to social media posts, undercover investigations, and advocacy work, some public opinion has become unfavorable toward the contests. 

Over the past decade, 10 states — California, New York, Oregon, Massachusetts, Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, New Mexico, Vermont, and Washington — have banned some form of killing contests (seven states since 2019 alone). Lawmakers in New Jersey and Illinois are currently considering regulations, though enactment can take years or might never happen at all. The New York bill was introduced in 2006, and several attempts to petition the Nevada Wildlife Commission have failed. In 2024, a federal bill was introduced to prohibit the contests on public lands but has gone nowhere. Even if such a law were to pass, a state like Texas would remain unaffected; about 93 percent of the land there is private. And in some states, like Oregon and New Mexico, the bans don’t apply to private land.

Carter Niemeyer, a hunter and retired employee of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, contends that public photos in the media and elsewhere of the contests are driving the backlash. They show “a very disgusting, reprehensible scene of bloody carcasses and animals thrown in piles and treated like garbage or trash,” he says. “I think that alone is what can make or break these killing contests.”

Yet social media can also be an asset for the contests. Randall, for instance, dreams of having his own hunting show and the SEO social platforms act as promotional fodder that feature championship belt buckles, winners holding up checks, and kids posing with their kills. Randall says the main objective of the contests, though, is getting people outdoors and helping the private landowners with predator management.

Other flash points include the ethical qualms over the disposal of unwanted carcasses and the baked-in entertainment factor. The most divisive issue, however, seems to be over the use of advanced technology.

Predator hunters might use red and white night lights, night scopes, thermal imaging, silencers, AR-style rifles, and electronic callers. They might spend an entire contest shooting from, say, a parked UTV without leaving to traverse the brush (this is legal in certain states, like Texas, but it’s illegal to chase down an animal from a moving vehicle; contest rules in Texas typically reiterate this). These methods — or “gimmicks,” as Niemeyer calls them — could certainly be used by some big-game hunters depending on state laws, but they are particularly well-suited for the 24-hour contests. As Randall says, “We try to be as efficient as we can — and quick.”

Harrison, the West Texas Big Bobcat Contest co-founder, defends the contests as observing fair chase — a code penned by the Boone & Crockett Club in 1887 that calls for “the ethical, sportsmanlike, and lawful pursuit and taking of any free-ranging wild game animal in a manner that does not give the hunter an improper or unfair advantage over the game animals.” As long as the predator isn’t confined to a pen, Harrison explains, then it’s fair chase. 

“I’m not apologetic for what we do,” he says. “It’s a necessary thing. Most people don’t have the stomach for it or the thrill — the thrill is a bad word — they don’t have the tenacity.” 

(In a statement, the Boone & Crockett Club said, “Contests are neither hunts nor wildlife management actions.”)

Today’s contests are sometimes sponsored by the country’s biggest gun and equipment manufacturers, like FOXPRO and Silencer Central — both sponsors of the West Texas Big Bobcat Contest, which has at least 42 sponsors that range from taxidermists to gun stores. The outfitter Cabela’s hosted the First Annual West Virginia Coyote Hunt in 2017 that paid out $10,000. Politicians have also hosted versions. Assemblyman Jeff Gallahan, a Republican, of western New York hosted an annual day contest — a seemingly more mild and historical version of today’s 24-hour ones — for nine years to hunt grouse, squirrel, rabbit, fox, and coyote. Afterward, the meat was cooked in a fundraising dinner for the local American Legion chapter. He says the New York ban was a “way to pull at the heartstrings at our constituents with the wrong information about how these hunts are organized.”

Many contests are marketed as a way to get kids off the couch and into the outdoors, something echoed by Harrison, Gallahan, and the SEO guys. Twisted Precision Rifles, which sponsors the West Texas Big Bobcat Contest, features photos of young boys on its website. Hornady has sponsored the Utah Coyote Youth Hunt for kids 17 and under accompanied by an adult, which gives away two rifles among other prizes. The Humane Society has tracked the involvement of youth in contests and as target audiences in promotional material since at least 2018 — something that concerns advocates.

“This is part of a deeply problematic picture emerging about the gun lobby getting involved in promoting hunting to youth,” says Michelle Lute, the co-executive director of Wildlife for All. “And all of this is happening under the guise of conservation when it’s not.”

IN 2004, THE FEDERAL ASSAULT WEAPONS BAN QUIETLY expired and ushered in an explosion of firearm sales that tripled from about 7 million to 21 million in 2020, according to The Trace. Kevin Bixby, a co-executive director of Wildlife for All, theorizes that this era spurred the recent rise of killing contests. “We had vets coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq,” he says. “And they took up these military weapons and AR-15s.” Logan Metesh, an arms historian, traces civilian use of military weapons back to at least the Revolutionary War, but agrees that the ban opened up the marketplace for “full-featured versions of the AR platform” that include collapsible buttstocks and muzzle devices.

The dissent among hunters over what constitutes proper hunting and what doesn’t has become a hot topic in the community in recent years, brought up specifically within the context of killing contests. 

In 2021, Cable Smith invited Ben Masters, a well-known wildlife filmmaker, onto his Lone Star Outdoor Show podcast after the two of them had a public disagreement on Instagram over killing contests. On the episode, Masters argues that the contests “turn away people we could be recruiting into the hunting community.” Hunting has been on the decline for decades; license holders have fallen from 8 percent of the US population in 1960 to 4.6 percent in 2020.

That same year, a MeatEater podcast episode was also dedicated to the same topic. James Tantillo, the episode’s guest and a lecturer at Cornell University on animal and hunting ethics, blamed animal-rights activists for pitting hunters against one another — a sort of manipulation on behalf of their agenda to ban contests.

“They’re finding hunters willing to do their dirty work for them,” he said on the podcast. “And it’s a stroke of genius.”

When I call him, he acknowledges that debates among hunters have been around for millennia but says the Humane Society — a leader of four state bans — has “been the most successful at driving a wedge between different hunting camps.” Katie Stennes, a senior program manager at the society, denies this. “Most hunters don’t support killing contests,” she says. “They just are afraid to speak out.”

The issue of killing contests has even infiltrated hunting families. Shortly after the SEO Varmint Roundup, I received an email from Cody Norton, whose brother Ty is part of Randall and Moyer’s SEO team. “I might have some different views than my sibling on the stance of predatory hunting,” he wrote, “like the tournament he helps host.” Later, Norton explained that he isn’t a fan of trophy hunting or hunting for entertainment. “I’m trying to preach this ethical-based hunting for necessity,” he says. “And not to kill just to kill.”

The debate about the ethics of killing contests often turns into one about personal choices — what type of rifle the hunter uses, whether he or she lures with an electronic caller, which photos they post on social media — but all of these concerns relate back to the fear that nonhunters will condemn and quash the entire industry because of what several people referred to as bad optics. At one point, Randall texts me to make sure the story isn’t a “hate on hunting” piece. Though, as Tantillo points out on the MeatEater podcast, “The optics of hunting in general are equally bad.”

This preoccupation with “optics” is confirmed to me one snowy Saturday in February, when I drive to Huntington Station, New York, on Long Island to attend a hunter education course led by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. I had signed up because I wanted to hear the section about ethical hunting.

An instructor named Ron begins the morning by asking, “What are ethics?” 

People raise their hands: being mindful of others, making a clean shot, following the hunting laws. Ron nods. All good answers but not quite what he seems to be looking for. We turn to page seven in our handbooks. “Hunting laws preserve wildlife, but ethics preserve the hunter’s opportunity to hunt,” reads a bullet point. “Because ethics govern the behavior that affects public opinion of hunters.” 

In other words, as another instructor named Julie says, “It’s always about image.”

A PREDATOR HUNTER PRIES A COYOTE still alive from a hole, flings it into the air, and shoots it as it runs off. Another hunter swings a limp coyote carcass as it hits an ATV. Laughter plays in the background. Yet another guy crushes a coyote with his snowmobile — legal in certain states — as it lets out a yelp, rolls over, and dies. “That’s how we roll, bitches,” he narrates offscreen.

The scenes from the 2021 documentary “Wildlife Killing Contests,” sponsored by the nonprofit Project Coyote, caused a stir in the hunting community. Masters, the wildlife filmmaker, posted a clip on his Instagram with a caption about his opposition to the contests and a message to his nonhunting friends that the movie doesn’t represent “99% of hunters.” And “it’s just wrong to kill a pile of animals for prize money,” he wrote. (This was the post that led to Masters’ appearance on the Lone Star Outdoor Show podcast, where he backtracked parts of his stance and said he hadn’t done his due diligence on Project Coyote.)

More than 350 people commented, including hunters with large platforms. They accused Masters of taking the side of “anti-hunters,” furthering a divide among hunters and endangering the image of hunting. Geoff Nemnich, a Nebraska podcaster and winner of the World Championship Coyote Calling Contest in Williams, Arizona. 

(Masters declined to be interviewed, writing in an email, “I don’t like the killing contests, but the subject is so dark that I just don’t want to be associated with it.”)

Despite the infighting that flared up among hunters, Pam Harte, an activist and producer on the film, was disheartened that the film didn’t have more legislative influence. “I thought if people know about this they’re going to be so upset,” she says. “And I couldn’t grab anybody’s attention.”

Even though advocates say contest organizing is moving underground as more states ban them, many hosts are still open about posting event details online. As Josh Branham, an organizer of a contest in Texas, says, “If you look hard enough, you can find a hunt pretty easily.”

Some contest participants provide behind-the-scenes footage in the style of reality TV. One group in Oklahoma, The 405 Crew, has posted thermal footage of them target-tracking coyotes, similar in feel to a first-person shooter video game. Jamie Hinson, a bodybuilder in North Carolina and the owner of Hinson Hunting Services, recently gave viewers a look inside a four-day contest he participated in earlier this year, a warmup for the Carolina Coyote Classic. The camera follows him as he loads up his Subaru and drives to a private property to set up his stand. He provides some advice to frustrated hunters: “Stay there, stay patient, keep callin’, and give it all you got.” Hinson says the contests are for “gathering people together” in the same way one might participate in a golf tournament, but that he doesn’t like ones that promote the most kills or allow baiting. At the same time, he says, humans are “the only means of maintaining order.”

Nemnich’s content in particular seems to be made for polarizing people — either riling them up or cheering him on. As someone with “an addiction for calling coyotes,” as his website states, he posts pile after pile of dead coyotes. He and fellow hunters, some of whom are students of his coyote hunting classes, pose with their kill in what is reminiscent of Donald Trump Jr. on a 2012 Zimbabwe hunt where he held up a dead elephant’s severed tail. (Nemnich also declined an interview, writing in an email, “Unfortunately the last deal like this I was part of only opened me up to tons of harassment and death threats from anti-hunters. Not that i really cared one way or the other but just ended up being a huge annoyance that wasted my time.”)

Also on Nemnich’s page are giveaways from Pulsar USA, a night-vision manufacturer and sponsor of his podcast, and his strategies and tactics for killing coyotes. “389 coyotes in 5 months is a personal record for me,” he wrote on Instagram last March. “But you can bet your ass I’ll be gunning to break it next season!”

ONE BY ONE, MUD-SPLASHED PICKUPS ROLL into the gravel lot behind the Wagon Wheel Gas N Go in Rosanky, Texas. A cluster of picnic benches has been pushed together, and a scale hangs off the back of Randall’s Ford F-350 like a fishing rod. Red goodie bags contain prizes from Crosshairs Texas, a local gun shop, alongside custom belt buckles for the winners. The bags, packed with scopes and binoculars, show a map of Texas and the shop’s phone number: 312.303.GUNS. 

The first team has already weighed their animals and starts drinking before anyone else shows up. The second team, Hold the Light Still, soon pulls up and drops dead coyotes and raccoons on the ground with their bare hands, picking up one and then another to decide which to enter. They choose a coyote they shot at 1 a.m. Randall and Cowan hoist the carcass and slip a hind leg into a looped rope on the weight before releasing the body: 43 pounds.

Other teams enter a raccoon with its intestines falling out and a coyote with a blackened tongue. One team shows up with 11 coyotes and eight bobcats, the most combined. At one point, someone comments on the stench: “Stinky motherfuckers.”

Moyer announces that they’re waiting on one last team being held up by a polygraph test — a tactic used by some like the West Texas Big Bobcat Contest to ensure no one has cheated — for the nearby Gonzales County Critter Getters Varmint Contest. While everyone mills around, a fur buyer rolls up in a truck with a U-Haul cargo carrier piled with dozens of gray fox carcasses. Shane Adcock has driven all the way from Lincoln, Nebraska, to scoop up the animals from the various contests in the area that weekend. He can’t legally purchase gray fox in Texas without a fur license, so the hunters donate them. His U-Haul already has a large heap, blood dripping from the bottom of the truck.

The final team shows up and the body weights tallied. The winners, some in blood-splattered camo, pose for pictures.

Afterward, Moyer jumps up on a picnic bench to thank everyone for coming and asks for feedback so they can refine the contest. People nod but everyone just seems eager to go to sleep and rest up for the next contest. This is the thick of contest season. In Texas, competitions are held every weekend from January to March. Moyer, Randall and Cowan planned to participate in the West Texas Big Bobcat Contest the following weekend where the first-place prize money for biggest bobcat has topped $45,000.

As Moyer says, “There’s a lot of money involved.”