Lower Rio Grande Valley News !!

Old Valley pioneer - family rancher sues enemies in Court ...

The oil - company clowns joked his pet Rhinos "Glowed in the dark..."

They most likely did, maybe him too ...

Source: San Antonio EXPRESS-NEWS, Monday, April 2, 2007.

By: John MacCormack

"It all started back in 1992 when Hidalgo County rancher James McAllen asked Forest Oil Co. to donate pipe to build pens for two endangered African black rhinoceroses that he was trying to save.

"But according to McAllen it wasn't until 2004 that Bobby Pearson, a retired Forest Oil employee, told McAllen that he pipe he was given more than a decade earlier was radioactive.

"By then he [McAllen] had lost part of a leg to a rare bone cancer.

"He also had shut down the rhino preservation project, launched under the auspices of the Game Conservation International, after both animals had sickened and one had died.

"According to depositions of Pearson and Daniel Worden, another Forest Oil employee at the ranch, company managers had joked about McAllen's rhinos glowing in the dark after the pipe donation.

"McAllen, who earlier had butted heads with Forest Oil over disputed gas payments, quickly saw a dark picture of premeditated malice."

As McAllen told the press:

There's no doubt they knew they were giving me the poisoned apple. Did they give it to me to get rid of me? It makes me wonder...

"[The suit] is set for trial in October in Edinburg."

Well, here's wishing Mr. McAllen luck. Because you know, good people, it makes me wonder, too! And to think Tony Hillerman has to write fiction to tells us things like this, when it's already there in some regional paper.