Deer Poacher Busted After Unknowingly Bragging to Game Warden on Dating App

An Oklahoma woman bragging to a man about her illegal hunting catch had no idea he was a game warden.

An Oklahoma woman hoping to impress a man on a dating app with a story of shooting a deer instead ended up facing thousands of dollars in fines after the man she was chatting with turned out to be the local game warden. 

Cannon Harrison, the game warden for rural McIntosh County in the eastern part of the state, made the usual small talk after matching with a woman on Bumble. When the woman bragged that she had “just shot a bigo buck,” Harrison’s ears perked up. Rifle hunting season was over, so he asked if she’d used a bow. That’s when she starting getting evasive. 

Harrison figured most people in the 20,000-person county would recognize him as the game warden, so he assumed he was being punked. 

“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.”

It was the middle of the night, so Harrison asked if she had been using a spotlight, which is illegal in Oklahoma. Then he asked for a photo of her catch.

Oklahoma Game Wardens

Harrison then set out scouring social media to find the woman and bring her to justice. In the morning, game wardens busted her at her home. The wardens took it easy on her, not charging her for using the spotlight or for wasting the deer’s meat, but charges for hunting out of season and possession of an illegally taken animal still added up to a fine of $2,400 for the woman and a male accomplice. 

Though the incident occurred over a month ago, the Oklahoma Game Wardens recently posted the story on their Facebook page, where readers mostly made fun of the woman for bragging about a buck that wasn’t even that big. 

Bill Hale, the head of the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife’s law enforcement division told the Tulsa World that his unit typically busts a couple of poachers every year based on reckless social media posts. But he’s not counting on another catch like this one. 

“A case like this, on a dating app, probably won’t happen again,” Hale told the World. “A person connecting on a dating app that happens to be a violator in the process of a violation and it happens that other person is a game warden? The odds of that happening are probably less than winning the lottery.”