Ranchers Cash In on Trophy Bucks : Wildlife: With wealthy hunters paying $5,000 to shoot a deer, $6,000 to bag an elk, some Texans are trading in their cattle to take advantage of the craze.

Philip Snowden remembers a time when getting permission to hunt deer on a friend’s ranch was as easy as a phone call.

“You’d just say, ‘It’s hunting season. Let’s go get a buck.’

“Now, if you tried to go back and do the same thing, they’d probably shoot you,” Snowden says with only half a chuckle.

What’s changed? The money.

Wealthy sportsmen are paying up to $5,000 for hunting leases to shoot just one trophy-caliber whitetail buck.

“It’s a big-money deal,” said Snowden, manager at a 4,000-acre ranch near Freer. “Some ranchers are getting rid of the cattle and keeping the deer.”

In rugged south Texas brush country where cattle and oil traditionally marked wealth, landowners from the 825,000-acre King Ranch on down are profiting from wildlife such as quail and deer.

“Instead of seeing them as a pest, the rancher now sees them as an asset,” Will Cohen, a wildlife specialist for Texas A&M; University Research and Extension, said.

The market is huge. A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service study estimated the amount that hunters spent on their sport in 1991 at more than $1 billion--in Texas alone. It’s a state with two-month deer seasons and 97% private ownership of land.

Cohen says stocked ponds for fishing leases and tours for bird-watchers also are a fast-growing market for ranchers who cooperate with nature.

Less wealthy hunters complain that private hunting rights in Texas put trophy deer beyond their financial sight. But ranchers and wildlife officials defend the lease system as the best way to encourage landowners to protect habitat.

“Hunting provides the reason to do it, the romance to do it, the funds to do it,” said Bill Carter, owner of Carter’s Country Stores in Houston, which offers guided hunting tours on its ranches in central, west and south Texas.

“What’s good for wildlife is also good for people,” he said. “We need the greenbelt. We need less bare land showing.”

Frank Horlock said his decision to emphasize wildlife over cattle at his 10,000-acre Rio Paisano Ranch near Falfurrias was based on profit.

“We feel it’s more profitable, with a more solid future than cattle,” he said.

But, he added, wildlife management provides a quality that doesn’t show up on his ledger--a more pleasurable way of life hosting hunters.

For $4,000, a visitor can spend four days at Rio Paisano to hunt for a trophy buck, a doe, a wild hog, a javelina and a wild turkey. Food, lodging and a hunting guide are included.

“That sounds like a lot of money, but when you consider that you are guaranteed a real fine-quality animal, it’s really not,” said Horlock.

The game-fenced Rio Paisano also offers guests a chance to shoot non-native species that Horlock has imported. The most expensive is the Rocky Mountain elk, which goes for $6,000.

Deer hunting leases have become popular throughout the state. Perhaps nowhere are they more profitable than in the south Texas brush country, where mineral-rich soil feeds a variety of plants that nourish the growth of impressive antlers on whitetail bucks.

“The hunters that come down here, they are not looking for a deer to kill. They are trophy hunters,” according to Leonel Garza, founder of the Muy Grande Whitetail Deer Contest in Freer.

In the mid-1960s, Garza said, a good hunting lease to kill two bucks sold for about $350. “Now people pay $2,500 to $5,000 for one buck. It won’t be very long before they are getting $10,000,” Garza said.

Pat Welder, who owns two ranches totaling 94,000 acres in La Salle County, leases deer hunting rights on tracts of 850 acres at $3.75 to $4.50 an acre. The longer quail season, with leases of $2 an acre, is even more profitable.

“It’s incredible income because basically it’s all net income,” said Sam Beasom, director of the Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute in Kingsville. “With wildlife, it’s just there, and you reap the benefit.”