A man faces felony charges in connection with the death
ByWSBTV.com News Staff
September 26, 2026 at 10:18 pm EDT
+Caption(Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
WHEELER COUNTY, Ga. — A 23-year-old man was shot and killed during an illegal hunting activity involving five adults Saturday in south Georgia, Georgia Department of Natural Resources Wildlife Enforcement Law Enforcement Division said.
Howard Benjie Hartley, 57, of Glenwood was arrested in connection with the deadly incident.
Game wardens with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources Law Enforcement Division responded to the area at approximately 3:30 a.m. after being requested by the Wheeler County Sheriff’s Office.
State officials said preliminary findings indicate the victim was killed while the group was engaged in illegal hunting. The precise circumstances behind the shooting weren’t disclosed.
Hartley has been charged with felony involuntary manslaughter, hunting deer at night, hunting from a motor vehicle and hunting big game from a public road.
The Department of Natural Resources Critical Incident Reconstruction Team is leading the ongoing investigation into the deadly shooting.
It’s the first documented outbreak of bird flu in captive mink in the U.S., and an advocacy group is raising concerns about Utah’s response.
(Mads Claus Rasmussen/Ritzau Scanpix via AP) Mink look out from a pen on a farm near Naestved, Denmark, on Nov. 6, 2020. Denmark ordered the culling of all farmed mink in the country during the coronavirus pandemic.
In Utah, thousands of mink spend much of their lives in small wire cages, raised on farms for the soft fur that makes them a lucrative commodity.
But even in the second-largest state in the U.S. for mink production, officials have no clear guidance about what to do when those close quarters leave the creatures vulnerable to disease, which can quickly run rampant.
In 2020, COVID-19 swept through 12 Utah farms, killing about 12,000 mink. Now, a bird flu variant has reached a Salt Lake County mink farm, where the virus is killing most of the furry herd kept there.
It’s the first documented outbreak of bird flu in captive mink in the U.S., said Kate Dylewsky, assistant director of government affairs at the Animal Welfare Institute, an advocacy group based in Washington D.C.
And public records that the group requested from the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food seem to suggest state officials have no clear plan to rein it in.
The rarity of such outbreaks, Dylewsky said, means mink farming has largely “slipped between the cracks in terms of regulation and oversight.” The wild animals are bred in captivity and raised on farms, occupying a regulatory gray area between wildlife and agriculture.
That lack of precedent was part of the challenge for Utah agriculture officials, who said there were “a lot of unknowns” when they began responding to the outbreak.
Get Top Stories newsletter. The day’s biggest stories every morning, delivered right to your inbox.
“Everything was on the table at the beginning,” the department said in response to written questions from The Salt Lake Tribune.
Federal agriculture officials typically provide guidance, the department said, but when an outbreak involves a species where the disease has never been seen before, “we figure out the best way to respond.”
‘Not looking good’
That uncertainty is reflected in 61 pages of texts, chat messages and emails between state agriculture officials, including state veterinarian Amanda Price, obtained by the Animal Welfare Institute and reviewed by The Tribune.
Throughout August, officials discussed how to respond to the outbreak, including whether to depopulate the farm, quarantine it, seek emergency approval for a vaccine and what would happen if they did nothing.
In an Aug. 21 message, one state agriculture official wrote that the “mink situation” was “not looking good” and that federal farm assistance programs did not cover mink or were unlikely to cover the farm’s losses.
That left three options, the official wrote: vaccination (if approved by the secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture), depopulation (if the USDA would provide compensation for the culled animals) or to “watch them die.”
(Mads Claus Rasmussen/Ritzau Scanpix via AP) Mink look out from a pen on a farm near Naestved, Denmark, on Nov. 6, 2020. Denmark ordered the culling of all farmed mink in the country during the coronavirus pandemic.
The owner of the farm expected to lose 80% of their mink to the outbreak without intervention, the official noted.
Officials initially sought vaccination, but as one wrote, “I might need some pressure higher up in USDA to get movement.”
There’s currently one bird flu vaccine approved for mammals, Utah agriculture officials told The Tribune, but only USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins can authorize its use. And because bird flu in mink is new in the U.S., the agency said there’s little research to guide the dosage or determine how well it would work.
The USDA hasn’t yet made a call on whether to allow Utah mink to receive the mammal vaccine, the Utah agriculture department said. The USDA did not return The Tribune’s request for comment.
‘Really no excuse’
Price, the state veterinarian, placed the Salt Lake County farm under a verbal hold, temporarily restricting activity at the facility while officials monitor the outbreak.
In the meantime, agriculture officials have “discussed and anticipated what would need to happen” if the virus spread to other species or posed a risk to the public, the agriculture agency said in its statement.
The Utah Department of Health and Human Services was also notified as a precaution. But with no defined protocol, agriculture officials said they were largely limited.
The animal advocacy group said the case points to a gap in oversight that could have implications for public health.
Mink are particularly susceptible to respiratory viruses, Dylewsky said, pointing to how quickly COVID-19 spread and mutated on mink farms in 2020.
Scientists have raised similar concerns about bird flu evolving to run rampant in humans. Given those risks, Dylewsky said, there is “really no excuse to not have a plan in place for an outbreak.”
In other countries, such as Finland and Spain, when bird flu has spread through mink farms, authorities have culled the infected animals.
Utah officials said they considered that option, but it’s “never an easy choice” and can be “devastating” for producers. Without financial help to cover those losses, they may not be able to financially survive, the department said.
Culling for economic reasons — to stop the spread and preserve the herd that remains — rather than “pure disease control reasons,” could also signal to the public that the animals pose a greater risk than the science shows, the department added.
For Dylewsky, though, the broader answer is to phase out mink farming altogether. She said legislation could help farmers transition into other industries rather than continuing to operate farms that can serve as “reservoirs” for diseases.
“We’re really playing Russian roulette here, because it takes one unlucky mutation of this virus to trigger a human health crisis,” she said.
With every additional mink that becomes infected, she said, “we’re rolling the dice again.”
