Profile: Criminal justice and wildlife management all part of agent training
by Sara DeBold, posted April 30, 2008
He is armed with a bachelor’s degree and a Glock semiautomatic pistol with 15 rounds plus one in the chamber. A typical day at work involves people with weapons and school children. He has equal to if not more authority than a state patrol officer. He is “the front line in fish and wildlife enforcement,” says Robyn Raisch.
Raisch is one of approximately 160 uniformed conservation agents in Missouri. What started as a suggestion from a friend turned into a long, fulfilling career enforcing wildlife laws throughout Missouri. After receiving an associate of arts degree from Jefferson Junior College, Raisch worked on a farm, at a gas station and a factory before he realized his true calling. Raisch is now 54 and Boone County’s local conservation agent.
Raisch attended Southwest Missouri State University, now Missouri State University. The University had just begun offering a new wildlife management and conservation degree as Raisch entered the school. The degree wasn’t just new to SMS; few universities offered conservation or wildlife management degrees then. Being in a new program meant Raisch didn’t have many peers in common.
“There was a lot of biology,” Raisch said. “I would look around class and be surrounded by nurses and veterinarians.”
Raisch, like all agents with the Missouri Department of Conservation, had to apply to the rigorous six-month conservation agent training program in Jefferson City. Not all applicants are accepted. Only 22 people were accepted out of 1,100 in Raisch’s class of 1983. Most recently, In 2006, there were 350 applicants and 20 were accepted. Raisch stressed how important it is to gain some experience before entering the training program.
“I wanted to get my foot in the door,” says Raisch. After receiving his bachelor’s of science in wildlife management and conservation, he got a part-time job with conservation research on lead shot vs. steel shot in waterfowl.
“I was housed in an old farm house. We slept in sleeping bags on the floor,” Raisch said. “You have to make sacrifices in beginning years.”
He is a good example of how sacrifices pay off in the end. He has been a conservation agent for 25 years now.
“Some days are better than others, but I have never woken up in the morning dreading going to work.” Before getting accepted into the training program, he also worked a temporary job at James A Reed Memorial Conservation Area in 1980. It wouldn’t be until 1983 that he would finally become an agent.
At the MDC natural resources law enforcement academy, students go through as many hours of training as a highway patrol officer. Raisch completed 1,200 hours of training.
“The Academy is six months long,” he said. “It teaches criminal justice and how natural resources relate to law enforcement.”
The trainees must be 21 years old by graduation, but there is no maximum age. There are physical requirements as well. Agents must be able to arrest violators, launch a boat, and work with and handle wild animals such as deer. Within the six months, trainees spend many hours in the field with agents, several weeks at the MDC Fish and Wildlife Research Center in Columbia and a week at the Lake of the Ozarks for boat training.
“You learn administrative duties, defense tactics, firearms training and all skills needed to be a conservation agent,” Raisch said.
Firearms training came easy to him, “I got my first rifle when I was nine or ten,” he said. “A big portion of the hours is identification, like fish and birds.”
But it’s definitely not all fish and birds. Raisch is really a Jack-of-all-trades.
“You need a background in natural resources, but you’re dealing with people. We don’t manage wildlife — we manage people,” Raisch said.
He says half of his job is law enforcement and the other half is public relations and resource management. He spends a lot of time dealing with the public and his responsibilities can seem endless: he educates the public on conservation issues, participates in game surveys, checks commercial and noncommercial permits, assists landowners in management issues, deals with nuisance animals, investigates pollution, enforces boating laws, and investigates calls from cougar sightings to vandalism. And this list isn’t nearly complete.
“One requirement is that you must be willing to be stationed anywhere in the state, but you get to write a memo of where you would like to go,” Raisch said. He first went to Scotland County, one of the most sparsely populated county in Missouri, and spent 11 years there. He has been in Boone County, the eighth most populated county in Missouri, for the past 14 years.
“I have plenty of stories,” said Raisch of the last 25 years.
Many of those stories come from various interactions with the public while checking anglers and hunters for limits and permits. Raisch’s second love, after his wife and daughter, is waterfowl hunting. After moving to Boone County, Raisch was a little concerned by one of the waterfowl hunters he encountered. While checking the hunter’s bag limit for duck, Raisch found a problem — the hunter didn’t have too many, he just didn’t have all ducks.
As he described in extreme detail what should have been obvious differences between a duck and the non-duck species the hunter had killed, Raisch’s knowledge and passion for the sport was apparent.. He gave the hunter a long lecture about knowing what species you are hunting before you shoot.
“Sometimes I wonder what people are doing out there,” Raisch said.
One of his investigations involved an eight-point buck that jumped through a window in a car dealership in Memphis, Mo. The deer was in the display room all night causing damage. When the owners walked in, the buck dove through a plateglass window and got away. Raisch investigated a similar incident in Boone County when a deer found its way into a house. The owners came home and found the deer in their bedroom.
Public education of wildlife and conservation is important to Raisch. Not only does he spend time educating groups of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, Raisch has spent every Saturday morning for the past 14 years taking calls on his radio show, The Great Outdoors, on KRFU 1400 AM in Columbia.
With only 160 agents in uniform, Missouri keeps Raisch and the other 159 agents busy. With the seemingly endless tasks an agent might undertake while enforcing Missouri’s wildlife code, it is no wonder only a dozen or so are selected out of a thousand. The job is quite a remarkable one and requires equally remarkable people.
