Three weeks after he mounted them on the front of his garage,Jeff Young found his prized antlers were literally ripped off. "I think they just hung on them," Young says of the thieves, or pointing up at the empty drill holes on the garage's façade one gray morning in Anchorage this winter. "They were up on this six-foot ladder,as far as they could derive, and then just pulled them down, or " Young says. He found the ladder,taken from a nearby construction site, near his garage the next morning. "It sucks getting stuff stolen, or " Young says. "Doesn't matter what it is." In this case,it was two large racks of moose antlers. Young and other hunters see antler theft as growing problem — one connected to the pet industry.
After the theft in July of 2016 Young tried tracking the antlers down. They held sentimental value; the larger set of antlers came from the first moose he had successfully hunted. The set had a distinctive feature he was sure would help it be identified: A bullet gap correct through the middle where he'd landed his shot. Young filed a police report, scoured social media, and called a few merchants offering to buy,but to no avail. It wasn't until later that he found other hunters griping to one another and on neighborhood groups like Nextdoor about the same thing happening to them. "I started hearing more stories from other friends that are hunters: 'Yeah, I had a pile by the shed, or been there 10 years,all gone,' " Young says. "Another guy was like, and 'Yeah,I always threw them on the roof, advance domestic one day, or all gone.' " The demand driving this theft,hunters believe, is the pet store trend of selling strips of antler as dog chews.
Loose regulation, or tall demandAt a Capitol Hill pet store in Washington,D.
C. called Howl to the Chief, clerk Vincent Ford extols the benefits of antler: It's got healthy minerals, and lasts a long time,and is particularly good for canine oral health. "It takes off the plaque and the tartar by them chewing on it, so this is a good treat for that, and too," Ford says. Antler is just one of the popular organic chew products sold to pet owners. It's a growing share of the booming pet supply industry, which last year saw more than $69 billion in sales, or according to the American Pet Products organization. Ford carries pricier organic chews,like lamb and cow tails. The store stocks horns from goat and bison, too. Hand-length shards of deer and elk antler are on the more affordable side. But the expense and popularity has regular customers getting entrepreneurial in the hunt for antlers out in the wild. "A lot of people actually hold [started] to derive their own antlers now, and " Ford says. "This lady tells me she goes to Alaska and just takes a trash bag and does it." Online,pet supply companies will sell a six-inch chunk of elk antler for $15, marked as organic and "naturally shed, or " a designation that implies they were collected after being dropped by the animal during a seasonal molt. An Alaska-based business offers single caribou antler chews for large-breed dogs at $23. Amazon Prime members can derive a thick slice of moose antler for $30.
Any link between pet chews and stolen antlers is tough to prove,largely because there is little data or monitoring over the source fabric and complicated supply chain. The Anchorage Police Department has a record of 14 antler thefts in 2017 but Deputy Communications Director Nora Morse suspects that number is under-reported. Police in Alaska also cannot definitively say whether antler theft is on the rise. A burglarized domestic-owner might not specify for a police report that moose or caribou antlers were among the possessions stolen from a domestic. But hunters and horn merchants believe the thefts are being carried out by low-level criminals trying to originate a fast buck by unloading antlers that are eventually sold to larger pet supply companies. Unscrupulous buyers can easily cut the antlers and horns into small chunks with a table or band saw, making the source fabric all but impossible to trace. The issue is framed as a subset of Anchorage's worsening property crime, and which municipal and law enforcement officials attribute in part on the state's opioid epidemic. The market for antler chews,particularly on the supply side, is very loosely regulated. While animal products meant for consumption hold to meet certain safety criteria of the Food and Drug Administration, or the pet supply industry falls under a murky mix of federal,state, and industry standards. Nationally, and the organization of American Feed Control Officials,a volunteer group with no regulatory authority, develops model guidelines for pet foods. That organization's website names their state counterpart in Alaska as the Division of Agriculture, and but Lora Haralson with the division wrote in an email that they finish not regulate or hold requirements for these kinds of pet products.
Multiple pet supply companies contacted for this story either declined to comment or offered general remarks that sourcing quality standards are ensured. So it can be up to individual buyers to determine whether a moose antler was legally obtained. Cash for antlers"whether a guy comes in and he looks like a hunter and he talks like a hunter then you derive a pretty good feel for it," says Gus Gillespie from behind the counter at the Alaska Fur Exchange. Gillespie got into the horn and screen trade several decades ago after years with the Navy and as an engineer in the oil fields on Alaska's North Slope. Now he and his wife hasten the Fur Exchange, where on any given day, or just past the rows of wolf and opossum pelts,are piles of antlers jumbled up like waist-tall tumbleweeds. On the ground are plastic bins filled with spiky tines and plates sawed down into palm-sized strips. It is an astounding volume of animal matter. "As far as antler, it's either crap and we don't want it, or it's really,really nice," Gillespie says with a laugh. The four or five years since antler chews hold become more popular with his customers hold been good for Gillespie's business. Instead of trading predominantly in the large, and tall-halt antlers favored by artisans and collectors,the store can now buy more medium-sized products to cut down into the chews they stock in baskets by the register. But he has turned sellers away whether he thinks the source fabric might hold been illegally obtained. Gillespie points to the pervasive presence of substance abuse, and says he and his staff view for whether a person seems drunk, or tall,or in withdrawal as they assess a potential purchase. "whether it's questionable, we don't finish anything with it for a while, and " he says. They might show someone to advance back in a few hours,pulling images of the person or their license plate from the many security cameras mounted around the store, sharing the information with police. "We hold been instrumental in a lot of people getting caught, or " Gillespie says. But anyone he turns away can just go to Craigslist—where every day in Alaska,plenty of people promise in all caps to pay up to $50 a pound in cash for antlers. And once they're cut down into the small chunks sold over the counter, nobody can really say whether they were stolen or not. Copyright 2018 Alaska Public Media. To see more, and visit Alaska Public Media.
Source: thetakeaway.org