Texas officials kill deer rancher’s entire herd, ending legal battle over CWD

It took more than two years and five attempts, but on May 28, Texas health and wildlife officials killed all the remaining captive white-tailed deer at Robert Williams’ highly fenced ranch in Kaufman County. Officials say the state-ordered depopulation is long overdue, capping a tumultuous legal battle that pitted the 85-year-old deer rancher against the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

A team of 68 state workers killed, dissected and disposed of 249 whitetails at the RW Trophy Ranch, a TPWD spokesperson said. All but a few shot guns, as Williams and his daughter Maree Lou Williams had personally euthanized three of their oldest deer before workers arrived. This included a 15-year-old breeder named Monarch Supreme, and an older doe that Maree Lou had bottle-fed as a fawn.

“Everything of [Maree Lou’s] They were pets, but she had one particular doe that allegedly came into the house and slept with her,” Williams said. Living outside. “We shot them and shot them humanely. I just didn’t feel like that old 15-year-old boy deserved such shitty treatment… I should have done it all that way.”

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Williams says he begged officials to let the deer walk through chutes — like those used to vaccinate livestock — while they shot them, but workers shot the deer as they ran back and forth in their pens instead. The entire operation, including the processing and removal of the deer, took place between 7 p.m. and 3:30 a.m., according to TPWD.

“They could have killed them mercifully, and I wouldn’t have felt so bad about it,” Williams says. “But they were brutally slaughtered and those deer went crazy. They bounced off the fence, crashed into each other and broke each other’s legs. They were shot in no time. That’s what burns me.”

The deer breeder promises to continue the fight against the state, just as he did when we visited the RW Trophy Ranch in January 2023. He says he will file another lawsuit against TPWD to seek reimbursement for the deer killed. (Below Texas lawpen-raised whitetails are treated not as livestock, but as a state-owned natural resource used by breeders until they are released from a pen – at which point they can never be brought back indoors.)

“While they were cutting [those deer] up, I said to Alan Cain [the director of TPWD’s big game grogram] it’s a mess, a mess,” says Williams, who never minces words when talking about the agency. “And they hate me too, because no one has ever kept them at bay like I have. I won many battles, but I lost the war.”

An outbreak of historic proportions

In an emailed statement to Living outsideTPWD officials said they felt the depopulation was necessary to protect the state’s wild deer herds, and because of how bad the CWD outbreak had become at RW Trophy Ranch.

The agency has long used depopulation as the primary tool to prevent the spread of CWD from captive deer breeding facilities, and they planned to do the same at the RW Trophy Ranch after one of Williams tested positive for CWD in March 2021. The attorney thwarted their efforts on four separate occasions by appealing to circuit courts, but the Texas Supreme Court ultimately sided with TPWD on May 15 of this year and vacated a temporary restraining order against the agency that had been filed in Kaufman County.

As of May 28, 254 of the captive white-tailed deer that had died at the ranch since March 2021 had tested positive for CWD, TPWD officials said. In an earlier legal filing, the agency referred to the breeding as “the worst CWD outbreak ever” in Texas history, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

“Almost 90 percent of the samples collected [from RW Trophy Ranch] tested positive or presumed positive this year,” TPWD said in the emailed statement. “RW Trophy Ranch lost an average of 2 percent of its deer herd each week. In addition, 12 deer also tested positive at release sites near or associated with RW Trophy Ranch.”

Officials added that during their most recent inspection of the Williams breeding facility on May 14, they “observed a number of deer exhibiting general signs of CWD, including drooping ears and disorientation.” They said a deer was “visibly twitching and shaking.”

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Williams has had several opportunities to work with the state. He has rejected multiple herd plans offered by TPWD, and he still claims that CWD is a “political disease” being weaponized by ranchers and wildlife managers who want Texas deer ranchers to go out of business. He says there have been no whitetail deaths from CWD yet, and all the captive deer he has lost since 2021 have died from other causes.

“[Texas Parks and Wildlife] put something in my pen, I’m convinced. And the Good Lord above would have to tell me they didn’t for me to ever believe it,” Williams says. ‘We have lost many deer, but for three and a half years we have had the poor sons in the same pens. I don’t care how healthy [your] are deer. If you keep them together for a long time, you will get more diseases. And we had a lot of pneumonia and a lot of EHD.”

Facing the consequences

Williams’ refusal to comply with Texas officials has also become a flashpoint in the state’s ongoing and heavily politicized battle over CWD management. In the past, many of the state’s deer breeders have stood up for Williams, arguing that TPWD has unfairly focused on captive breeding operations in its efforts to control the disease. This includes the Texas Deer Association, an industry group that lobbies for deer breeders.

“What you’ll see is that it’s pretty easy for people to point the finger at deer ranchers as the direct cause of CWD,” TDA Director Kevin Davis said. Living outside in January 2023. Davis has argued that TPWD’s testing is unreasonably skewed when it comes to deer ranchers, and that the industry has been scapegoated as a result. (As evidence, he points out that TPWD has tested about 75 percent of captive deer populations, compared to less than 0.3 percent of wild populations.)

However, in April, even the TDA supported killing the deer at Williams’ ranch. In a letter to TPWD Director David Yoskowitz, the organization expressed its support for the depopulation.

“We support the department’s efforts to resolve this unfortunate situation on behalf of all hunters, landowners and conservationists,” says the letter signed by Davis and other TDA leaders. “Unfortunately, we believe that depopulation is the best strategy to mitigate the risks associated with this facility.”

With his herd gone and his following dwindling, Williams sees no point in continuing to raise white-tailed deer in Texas. He says if he were younger, he would move his business to Oklahoma, which he calls the “only breeder-friendly state in the union.”

The Sooner State is home to hundreds of captive breeding operations, and last month state lawmakers passed a law that aims to use captive deer to improve the “genetic sustainability” of wild white-tailed deer against CWD. This law, known as the Chronic Wasting Disease Genetic Improvement Act, will allow private landowners to purchase farmed whitetails that meet genetic testing criteria and release these deer onto their own property as soon as 2026.

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On Wednesday afternoon, after state workers left his ranch, Williams finally drove to the depopulation site to survey the aftermath. He found shell casings scattered on the ground, some still lying in pools of blood. But the hardest thing to bear, he says, was that his cages were empty.

“I drove by where that big money was, and when I saw there was nothing there, I cried,” Williams says. “When I bought my first deer almost forty years ago, I never in my wildest dreams thought I would make money with antlers that big. And I never thought Parks and Wildlife would become my worst enemy. But they have destroyed my livelihood. At 85, they have destroyed what I love to do.”