The only date these two could have is a court date.
Opposites don’t always attract, especially when they fall on opposites sides of the law. And that’s exactly what happened last month when an Oklahoma game warden received a flirtatious greeting from an unwitting poacher.
Cannon Harrison, a game warden for McIntosh County, Okla., wasn’t thinking of his job when he responded to a message on Bumble — a dating app that allows only women to make the first contact with prospective suitors.
But after the two exchanged brief pleasantries, the conversation took a hard turn. When Harrison asked how the woman was doing, she replied she had “just shot a bigo buck” and was “pretty happy about it.”
That caught Harrison off guard. So much so, he assumed she was joking.
“Honestly, the first thing I thought was that it was someone who was messing with me because they knew who I was,” Harrison told The Washington Post. “It seemed too good to be true.”
But what unfolded was, in fact, just good enough to be real.
Game Warden Busts Poacher on Dating App
Harrison, 24, doesn’t list his profession on Bumble. But he told the Post he expected people would know in a rural county of about 20,000 people. So to see if it was a gag, Harrison kept the conversation going. “Hell yeah, get em with a bow?” he replied. The season for rifle hunting had expired, so a bow kill would have been legal.
“Well we don’t need to talk about that,” she replied.
With the plot now thick enough to stop a shotgun blast, Harrison committed to finding out what was going on. He tried another angle.
“Haha, spotlight?” he asked. An illegal practice, spotlighting occurs when poachers hit deer with a floodlight from a vehicle, freezing them in place before shooting them.
“Yeah,” came the reply. When Harrison asked where, the woman revealed the location of her ranch. For good measure, Harrison also asked if she had some evidence — er, pictures. Needless to say, she obliged.
Now armed with a name, smoking gun, confession, and a location, Harrison did some internet sleuthing. He quickly zeroed in on the woman’s real identity and passed the info to the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation Game Wardens, who promptly paid her a visit.
Harrison told the Tulsa World that officials informed the woman she and an accomplice faced $2,400 in fines for improper possession of an illegally taken animal and taking game out of season. According to Harrison, she immediately agreed to pay her full share of the fine to avoid jail time.
You can see the entire exchange on the Oklahoma Game Wardens Facebook page.
