Beaver bounty hunter: 'Tail it to the jury'

He’s a bounty hunter, make no mistake about it.
Johnny Vead does not look like Steve McQueen from the old television western, nor does he look like Dog, the mullet-wearing “brah” of more recent TV fame.
But he is a bounty hunter.
Vead doesn’t chase bail jumpers -- he chases tail thumpers. Beavers, that is. Brown gold. Symbol of industriousness, determination, good dental hygiene -- and Canada. Builder of dams and flooder of fields. The pudgy, flat-tailed, buck-toothed web-footed “water rat” has made it to the top of the Police Jury’s most-wanted list.
If they remade McQueen’s old show with Vead in the lead, it would be renamed, “Wanted: Dead.” Or maybe they could remake Richard Boone’s Western and rename it “Have Trap, Will Travel.”
Since signing on as the Avoyelles Police Jury’s hit man for beavers, Vead has been bringing in a few tails a day. Not enough to put a dent in the “dam” things, but at least he’s gnawing away at their numbers.
Should one of his captives protest his innocence, Vead will probably just tell him, “tail it to the jury -- the police jury.” (Sorry, promise that was the last beaver-related pun.)
The Police Jury pays Vead $40 per tail. That is all they want or care about. The pelt, the meat and everything else is Vead’s to do with as he wishes.
On the trap line on a recent excursion, Vead took this reporter out into the field to see first-hand what the public is getting for its money. The traps set out the day before yielded two prizes in the morning run.
“Beavers have it made,” Vead said. “They don’t have to go to work, pay bills, go shopping, pay taxes. They don’t have television, computers or telephones. All they have to do is eat and make baby beavers,” he said with hearty laugh. Vead laughs a lot. He likes a good joke and likes to talk about his favorite pastimes -- drinking a few beers with his friends, hunting wild hogs, playing with his nine grandchildren, working in his garden and trapping fur-bearing animals -- not necessarily in that order.
As we sat on a four-wheeler with a dead battery -- thanks to the 3-year-old playing with the buttons the day before and leaving the battery on -- I wondered if maybe grandkids dropped a notch on the list. No worry there. Vead just laughed, talked about the joys they bring to his life and cranked the vehicle up the old-fashioned way with a pull cord.
“I will tell anyone who thinks about doing this -- don’t quit your job to go into trapping,” Vead said. “I do this to bring in a little something to supplement the retirement check, and I love doing this. “Gotta love it” “You gotta love it to go through this,” he said, gingerly setting a trap that was sprung but came up empty during the night. “You do or you don’t. There’s no in-between.”
Vead is 61, retired from the oilfields of Amoco Production and a life-long hunter, fisherman and trapper. He decided to turn his love for trapping into a public service job when his house in Hickory Hill was shaken by a nearby explosion a few weeks ago.
“I ran outside, looked around expecting to see smoke coming from somewhere, but couldn’t see anything,” Vead said. “Somebody told me that someone was blowing a beaver dam. I called Anzell (parish superintendent Anzell Jones) and he said it wasn’t the parish. We started talking about the beaver problem and one thing led to another and he asked if I’d be interested in trapping beavers for the parish. I said I would and he said he would bring it to the jury for their consideration.”
Vead said it is tempting to resort to drastic methods such as dynamite when you come upon a large lodge, but it is against the law to do it in a residential area. “You can bust slabs, break windows, do all kinds of damage by just tossing dynamite around,” he said. “Also, if you did blow up a lodge you had better be ready with a lot of shotguns because they’re coming out hot and heavy -- if the concussion doesn’t kill them.”
The fur business has changed a lot in the past 40 years, Vead said. “When I was young, the trapping license was $2,” he said. “One Christmas I went trapping for raccoon. I caught 10 ‘coons and sold the fur for $200. They paid $20 per pelt. Now, the license is $25 and a good beaver pelt goes for $8, if you can find someone who will pay even that.”
Vead said the Southern beaver is not as valuable as its Yankee and Canadian cousin because the fur does not plump up as much due to the lack of very cold weather. A recent fur report was anticipating Northern beaver furs to go up to $50 for select furs with averages between $15-$20 per pelt.
The official trapping season has past, and people aren’t supposed to trap animals during the spring when females are giving birth and caring for newborns. However, since the Police Jury has declared the beaver to be a nuisance animal, Vead is able to trap them.
One juror said after the jury’s last meeting that the more pregnant beavers caught, the better. Vead would not get paid the bounty for the unborn beaver tails. However, he said the jury told him they don’t care how big the tail is. A tail is a tail and it’s worth $40.
On his next trap run after our excursion, Vead came back with a very plump Mama beaver, who he believes left a litter of kits in the lodge we had spotted the day before. In another trap, he nabbed a bullfrog -- who wasn’t quite fast enough to jump away before the trap sprung. “You never know what you’ll come back with,” Vead said. “Sometimes nothing, sometimes anything.”