What are the chances of a poacher matching with a game warden without even realising it?
A braggadocious poacher who was looking for love found herself with a hefty fine instead when it turned out the man she was talking to on a dating app was a game warden.
Cannon Harrison, a warden with the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation, could not quite believe it when the woman he was chatting to on Bumble started boasting about killing a deer.
The potential suitor, not knowing Cannon’s job, told him that she was in high spirits because she had just shot a “bigo buck”.
“Honestly, the first thing I thought was that it was someone who was messing with me because they knew who I was,” he told The Washington Post.
“It seemed too good to be true.”
Keeping his wits about him, Cannon got the woman to admit how and where she had killed the deer, as well as sending him pictures.
Images posted on the Oklahoma Game Wardens Facebook page show that the head of the buck had been removed.
From the conversation he was able to work out that she did not kill the deer with a bow, something which may have been legal, and that she used a practice known as spotlighting, which is shining a light in the deer’s eyes to startle it.
This is also illegal in the state.
Armed with the woman’s first name, a photo and a rough location, he was then able to track her down via social media, enabling wardens to descend on the property soon after.
The woman pleaded guilty to “hunting deer out of season and possessing game that was taken illegally”, according to the Post, and she and an accomplice were fined a total of 2,400 US dollars (£1,880) for the incident.
MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said Tuesday police seized the largest haul of methamphetamine in the country in years without anybody being killed, in a subtle criticism of his predecessor’s notoriously deadly crackdown on illegal drugs.
Police seized nearly 1,630 kilograms (1.8 tons) of methamphetamine Monday from a van and arrested its driver at a checkpoint in Alitagtag town in Batangas province south of Manila. Intelligence operations were underway to arrest other suspects, officials said without elaborating.
Locally known as shabu, the powerful stimulant had a street value of more than 13 billion pesos ($228 million), officials said.
"This is the biggest shipment of shabu that we’ve seized, but not one person died. No shots were fired and nobody was injured because we operated slowly,” Marcos told reporters in Alitagtag, where he presented the boxloads of seized drugs to the press.
"This should be the approach in the drug war for me and the most important objective is to stop the smuggling of illegal drugs into the Philippines,” Marcos said, adding that the newly seized drugs came from outside the country.
Marcos, who took office in mid-2022, has vowed to continue the crackdown on illegal drugs launched by his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, but said it would be done differently and focus more on rehabilitating drug addicts.
Under Duterte, more than 6,000 mostly poor suspected drug dealers were killed in reported clashes with law enforcers. The widespread killings alarmed Western governments, including the United States, and sparked an ongoing International Criminal Court investigation as a possible crime against humanity.
Police say there have been considerably fewer killings of drug suspects under Marcos, but human rights groups have expressed alarm over the continued killings and asked Marcos to cooperate with the ICC in investigating the killings that took place when Duterte was president and a longtime mayor of southern Davao city.
As president, Duterte withdrew the Philippines from the ICC’s founding treaty in 2019 after the court launched a preliminary examination into thousands of killings under his anti-drugs crackdown.
Critics said then that Duterte’s move was an attempt to evade accountability. The ICC prosecutor, however, said the court still has jurisdiction over alleged crimes while the Philippines was still a member of the ICC, a court of last resort for crimes that countries are unwilling or unable to prosecute themselves.
Marcos told Manila-based foreign correspondents on Monday that his relationship with Duterte is “complicated.” The brash-speaking Duterte has openly accused Marcos of being a weak leader and of using cocaine in the past, an allegation that the current president has repeatedly denied.
Marcos’s vice president is Duterte’s daughter, Sara, and they were elected in 2022 with landslide victories.
Marcos renewed his stance that he would not bring the Philippines back to the ICC. When asked if he would hand over Duterte if the ICC decides to issue a warrant for his arrest in the future, Marcos said he would not.
In this handout photo provided by the Batangas Public Information Office, Philippine President. Ferdinand Jr., third from left, talks to reporters as he visits Alitagtag town in Batangas province, Philippines on Tuesday April 16, 2024. Marcos Jr said Tuesday police seized the largest haul of methamphetamine in the country in years without anybody killed, in a subtle criticism of his predecessor's notoriously deadly crackdown on illegal drugs. (Batangas Public Information Office via AP)
