You missing alot of the point. They thrive in Texas due to land ownership segmentation. Every fence line is different. One land owner may hate them and shoot everyone he sees, the next may hate hunting and allows zero hunting for anything, and the next landowner sees $8k per ram he sees. With that said No rancher in Texas is looking for handouts by the U.S. tax payer due to Exotics. Only thing close would be a drought rangeland insurance program, but that’s an insurance program based on rain fall not exotics. In fact the whole post is about Texas changing the laws to allow FAA to allow monetary exchange for helicopter commercial hunting (just like they did with hogs).. exact opposite of socialism
comparing aoudad populations based off eco systems of NM and TX, is mental gymnastics. It’s trifling at best. The real differences in populations again goes back to land owner ship blocks. Texas has a private land block damn near larger than entire state of NM. Infact the entire NM aoudad range is a 1/5 of Texas Aoudad range at best.