Parrish bags oryx in exotic hunt
Until this past weekend, Coahoma's Garett Parrish hadn't been hunting since he was paralyzed in a 2015 accident.
Over the weekend, he traveled to Voss, Texas, to a ranch owned by the Robertson family, and hunted his first exotic animal, a Scimitar Ibex. The hunt was set up by Weston Jenkins and his company, Disabled Outdoorsmen USA.
“It was great! I haven't been hunting – actual hunting – in six years, since my accident. I haven't actually gone out and participated in an actual hunt,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I didn't have very high expectations. I figured I would go out and miss three times, and we would talk and that would be that. But it went really well. I brought my setup I had used for my previous event and it went great. I only shot one time and took the oryx down and it's a trophy animal. It was a great, great setup by the organization and the Robertson family.”
Jenkins explained that a friend of Parrish's from their Coahoma High School days remembered Parrish and the news of his paralyzation in a sledding accident.
“They're
actually
hometown friends,” Jenkins said. “When her and I got linked up together, she told me about him after she found out about my non-profit. So we just decided to have a hunt for him. She went out and got an oryx, an exotic, for him and put it out there.”
According to Wikipedia, the Scimitar Oryx, also known as the Sahara Oryx, is a type of antelope native to Africa that went extinct in the wild in 2000, but breeding of the animal in captivity led to their reintroduction to the wild in 2016.
“They're just real big and white, and they've got big horns that go straight back. The horns are actually made out of hair,” Jenkins said. “The oryx, they're a white animal with a real low fat percentage. They're not like whitetail, that are going to be bedded down all day. The oryx are going to be out and about and grazing.”
Parrish described his experience hunting the oryx.
“It didn't feel any different for the day than hunting something around here, but it was very exciting,” he said. “It was definitely different than certain animals. They don't go to deer feeders and stuff like that, you just kind of have to stalk them to a certain degree. It was really fun. I really enjoyed it.
Parrish said the hunt organizers drove him to the site in a utility vehicle called a Mule.
“They put my wheelchair in the bed and drove me to about where the animals were, and then we got out and set up,” he said. “I was planning to be there for two days, and I shot the animal in the first hour. They were in a great spot whenever we got there, so it worked out really well for us.”
The equipment was specially designed to allow him to aim and shoot despite his lack of mobility, Parrish said.
“We got a gravity-eliminated gun mount that I can move around with my chin and my shoulder, and like a wrist brace with a hook on it,” he said. “My
Courtesy Photo