Who ya gonna call?
What a great time of year! The days are getting shorter, the weather is getting cooler, and hunting season is here. But wait – there’s more! This is also the time of year when redfish and black drum start running, and fishing in general, in most places, is just grand. There’s no excuse not to get out and partake in those activities if you’re so inclined.
And with all that going on, it’s no surprise that this is the busiest time of year for game wardens, making it hard for them/us (once a warden, always a warden) to be in the right place at the right time. It’s not uncommon for a warden to be working dove hunters on one end of the county and get a call for an “in progress” fishing violation on the other. It’s enough to run you ragged if you let it.
A Texas Game Warden is on call 24 hours a day on scheduled workdays. I can’t count the number of times over the years that I got home from a long day on the water, or maybe a long night on the side of a lonesome road somewhere, and after laying my head down, the phone rang. It was usually either the sheriff’s office of whatever county I was stationed in, or Austin headquarters dispatch with an Operation Game Thief (OGT) call.
Here’s the OGT scoop straight off the Texas Parks and Wildlife webpage: Operation Game Thief is Texas’ Wildlife Crime-Stoppers Program, offering rewards of up to $1,000 for information leading to the conviction of a wildlife crime. Begun in 1981 as a result of laws passed by the 67th Legislature to help curtail poaching, the program, a function of the Law Enforcement division of The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, is highly successful, having been responsible for the payment of over $195,000 in rewards. Privately funded, the program is dependent on financial support from the public through the purchase of OGT merchandise and memberships, donations, sponsorships, and gifts. If a violation is currently in progress, please call 800-792-GAME (4263) immediately
So, there you go. If you’re out and you see somebody that has done something they ought not have done, all you gotta do is call. The dispatcher that takes your call will find a game warden to respond, and just like the lyrics to a James Taylor song, you just call out their name and they’ll come running.
- 24/7.
If a case is made off the information you provide, you might get a reward.
However, please double- check the validity of whatever violation you think you are reporting because the dispatcher won’t do it for you. For example: one of the most egregious abuses of the OGT program I ever got was a report of a group of fishermen, allegedly fishing without licenses, who were wade fishing late at night not far from a hoity-toity Ocean Drive address in Corpus Christi. Just so you know, each OGT call comes with an optional callback number for the person reporting the violation. I got this call at 2 in the morning, and a call back number was provided. You can bet they were gonna get a call.
Surprisingly, they answered. After identifying myself, I asked, “How can you tell they don’t have licenses?” After much hem-hawing about the clunker truck the fishermen had parked in a public area near the caller’s home and the use of various other identifiers that I don’t care to discuss in a family column, I informed the caller that I would not be responding and laid my head back down and went back to sleep.
The Operation Game Thief program is great, and I encourage anyone who suspects a violation, whether it’s in progress or ongoing, to call. And who ya gonna call? That’s easy: 800-792-GAME.
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