Poaching can also be a calling. At least according to Rickey Swearingen, a former poacher who lives near Salisbury, North Carolina. Swearingen had been arrested in 1992 after his neighbors reported him for poaching. In 1991, a friend asked Swearingen to poach a deer. He’d lost his job at the Cannon Mill in Salisbury and was desperate. “Kenny stood there in front of me and cried like a baby because he could not feed his kids and his wife,” Swearingen said. As a child he’d learned to hunt deer, rabbit, and quail from his father. “He begged me to shoot a deer for him, and I shot a deer for him.”

“When someone ain’t got food,” he said, “you do what you can for them.”