Still-twitching deer gutted by poacher for grisly Facebook post
Deer hunter John ‘Nogsy’ Nolan boasts about his latest kill online
A CONVICTED criminal who was the focus of a Garda operation targeting illegal deer hunting has posted a gruesome video to social media showing him slicing a deer open that is twitching and kicking on the ground before he decapitates the animal.
John ‘Nogsy’ Nolan uploaded the recording to his Facebook page claiming ‘people may find it upsetting but it’s called dispatching animals cleanly’.
He continued: ‘To be honest I don’t care if ye don’t like hunting or what comes with it… These are going to make tasty burgers.’
To the untrained observer it appears the animal is still alive as Nolan takes a knife to
‘Movement is likely caused by nerve spasms’
its body. The animal’s hind legs kick out as Nolan holds its front legs before all four legs twitch and kick as its body is sliced open.
The deer appears to kick out at least a dozen times as it is being ‘dressed’ in a field after being shot.
At one stage he appears to flail away from Nolan as his torso is cut open. The deer’s legs continue to twitch as the hunter removes the animal’s internal organs before it finally lies still. Nolan then cuts the head off the deer before cutting off each of its legs.
Dr Andrew Kelly, chief executive at Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, told the Irish Mail on Sunday that the deer in the video ‘appears to be dead’ before it is gutted and the movement is likely to have been caused by ‘nerve spasms’.
He added: ‘The ISPCA is opposed to killing of wild animals and the infliction of any suffering on them. This includes the hunting and killing of wild animal for the purpose of sport or for taking of skins, furs, plumage, ivory and horn.’
A veterinary source told the MoS an animal that has been killed ‘properly and humanely’ would only continue twitching for ‘seconds’.
‘I’ve seen it done properly and you’re talking maybe 10 or 20 seconds, certainly not sustained twitching,’ the experienced vet said. ‘It depends on how the animal is killed and how well the brain has been immobilised.’
In various online posts Nolan refers to himself as the ‘number one poacher in Ireland, but yet never held a gun licence in my life’. In one post he told his critics the deer he kills are ‘stone dead’ before he takes a knife to them.
‘Nobody is going to stop me,’ he writes. ‘It’s going to be tradition in my family and hopefully my young lad when he has his family. It’s an Ireland tradition.’
In another post he described how he can now defend his actions on Facebook after being off social networking site for a year.
He continued: ‘I poached, I am not going to lie about that. I poached salmon, I poached deer.’
In a post last month he told how he was banned from Facebook for a week for allegedly bullying a man he was once jailed for threatening to kill.
The MoS has also learned the deer hunter has become embroiled in a row with a local criminal gang.
Senior gardaí in the southeast are ‘very concerned’ about an ongoing and increasingly volatile feud between Nolan and a criminal gang in Carlow. Nolan, who was released from prison last year after being jailed for threatening to kill a man, took to Facebook this week to make veiled threats in a 13-minute post which has since been deleted.
In the post, he said he doesn’t have a gang behind him but challenged anyone to make threats against him or his family.
Nolan came to prominence in 2013 when the MoS revealed he was the target of a Garda operation code named Operation Bambi, which targeted illegal deer hunting.
He took to Facebook to boast about his exploits telling friends the ‘stupid’ deer are ‘like sitting ducks in a field’.
In 2018 Nolan was jailed for threatening to kill a man who challenged him in a designated hunting area. He lost an appeal against the eight-month sentence after it emerged he presented a false letter of employment to the court, purporting to show he worked for a man who later told gardaí he never wrote the letter.
In the case the victim had questioned Nolan as to why he had been in a designated hunting area – Gowle Wood, at Clonmore, Co. Carlow – on November 23, 2013. Nolan threatened to ‘smash his skull in’ and burn out his house and 4x4 in what was described in court as a ‘totally unprovoked’ verbal attack by phone.
While in custody for that crime he was brought to court in handcuffs when he tried to get his seized hunting gear – including butcher’s knives and an 18-pointer red stag head trophy – back from gardaí. Nolan did not respond to a request for comment.