Posts Tagged → poach
PA landowners now enjoy actual privacy rights
Bravo, kudos, and thanks to the unanimous Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Pennsylvania landowners now enjoy the actual verbatim privacy rights that both the US Constitution (Fourth Amendment) and the PA State Constitution (Article 1, Section 8) say we have.
This right to basic privacy has been a long time in coming, and like all individual rights, it was heavily, aggressively, shamefully resisted by actual Americans in government positions.
For a very long time, the idea of “Open Fields” ruled the way that wildlife enforcement officers accessed private property here in PA. Here in PA, PA Game Commission and PA Fish & Boat Commission officers would just walk right onto and deeply into a private property, regardless of its posted signs, regardless of the landowner’s demand that the officers leave, regardless of whether or not the officers had any probable cause or reasonable suspicion to be on the private property. Like kings, they would simply stride right up to within talking distance of a home, and start poking around.
You might not even hunt, or be a licensed hunter, or fish, and yet, these government agents just decided to watch you…
PGC and PFBC said this was both justified by law (it kind of was allowed by a somewhat related court ruling from the Prohibition Era regarding bootlegging moonshine), and necessary because of the unique challenges facing wildlife managers. Because PA has a strong anti-baiting law and culture among law-abiding hunters, it has been customary for Game Wardens to creep around private properties, looking for bait piles, salt blocks, some wildlife crime, etc. Without a search warrant.
But not all Game Wardens have been looking for illegal bait or signs of poached deer way out in our woods. They have also pretty brazenly walked right around people’s private homes way the hell out in the middle of large private properties, apparently at the request of the PA State Police, who were already limited to search warrants.
They have also surreptitiously hidden spy cameras on these private properties. In places where all Americans presume they can fully enjoy their rights to privacy without being interrupted or disrupted or alarmed by the sudden appearance of a man with a gun. Without “the king” surveilling them, without any reason other than simply wanting to.
That the PGC long adamantly defended this un-American behavior understandably rankled people, to the point where some sued the PGC over what was truly egregious behavior by people who should know better. And yesterday, they won; we all won. A unanimous PA Supreme Court held that our individual right to privacy is greater than the PGC’s desire (not its proven need) to simply walk around and see what Americans are doing within the privacy of their own properties.
Yes, managing wildlife is difficult. Yes, trying to outwit lawbreakers who bait deer and bear is hard. But, Americans’ constitutional rights supersede all other considerations.
And it is the role of government to protect our rights for us, not to officially chip away at them, in the name of government efficiency. People in government know this, and they should conduct themselves accordingly. But as you and I have seen so, so many times throughout our careers, once people get some power, especially the power to rule over others, they really do not want to let go of it. Americans are supposed to have government employees who are immune to this draw, but guess what, we don’t. Human nature has not changed.
As of today, government officials may not simply walk onto your property or mine, without a search warrant or without exigent circumstances, such as chasing an armed bad guy who happens to take refuge on your property, or without actually seeing a bait pile while on an adjoining property.
The result of this freedom is that poachers are going to poach more wildlife, no question about it. But that is the price of individual freedom and limited government. If the role and purpose of government was to be always efficient and always effective, we Americans would have no rights, and our government would be totalitarian. America is not that kind of place.
Better that some bad dude goes free than all of us suffer the indignity and danger of armed government agents just walking around our private properties, watching us…
Thank you to the Institute for Justice, which has done yeoman’s work for all of us Americans who cherish our freedoms. And thank you to the hearty Pennsylvanians who chose to stand and fight back against official injustice, like our predecessors did 250 years ago.
Why do people trespass on private property?
During one of his many temporary incarcerations, infamous bank robber John Dillinger was asked by a news reporter why he robbed banks, and he famously quipped “Because that’s where the money is.” Funny enough, true enough, but Dillinger eventually ended up being shot to death by both civilians and a ragtag assortment of law enforcement agents who were fed up with his lawlessness.
I have been similarly wondering: Do people, particularly hunters, trespass on private property because that is where the wild game is? Or is there some other reason that turns otherwise normal people into lawless jerks who instigate their victims into acts of violent retaliatory fury?
My observation and experience is hunters, in particular, trespass on posted private land, and end up poaching wildlife there, because they are drawn to the mystery and promise of new territory. They think that a plot of private land that is carefully cultivated wildlife habitat must have some really nice, abundant, maybe even trophy wildlife on it. And sometimes these outlaws do, in fact, stumble into a kind of bank vault of wildlife, where they feel like they have hit the jackpot.
The problem with trespassing on posted private hunting land is that someone else, the landowner or a club that leases from the owner, has probably spent a lot of time and resources maintaining that land. Paying the real estate taxes on it, managing it, making it a sanctuary or haven for wildlife. All year long that landowner runs chainsaws, plants and prunes fruit trees, sprays herbicides, clears trails, plants various crops like clover that most wildlife find attractive.
These considerable efforts are done for the benefit of the landowner, his family, his friends, or for the club members who pay him for the opportunity to exclusively hunt there, in a very brief window of time. Hunting seasons are usually just a few weeks long. This investment of time and money is like any other investment, say, a savings account at your local bank. Or your retirement pension.
Trespassing and poaching are not victimless crimes. A landowner’s entire year’s work can go out the window from it.
Trespassers enter into the private property and, purposefully or by mistake, disturb the wildlife, maybe scare it away and off the property; poachers kill the wildlife. These disruptions come at a great cost to the landowner, who for 50 prior weeks has been working hard, husbanding the land’s natural resources, and suddenly finds himself at a disadvantage when he should be reaping his just reward.
Someone else has come along and taken advantage of all his hard work and investment, someone else has claimed his reward that he was looking forward to. Most often, the trespass intrusion and poaching so greatly disturb the property’s carefully arranged balance, that the landowner gets little to nothing of what he had worked so hard to attain. And hunting seasons are so brief that there is no time to wait out the disturbance.
This is exactly how both trespassing and poaching are forms of theft. Thievery. Scumbag-ness. Dirtball-ness. A-hole-ness. And when someone has stolen something from the landowner, the landowner can get angry about it. Sometimes really, really angry. Especially if the thief acts like the whole thing is no big deal. Because it is a really big deal to screw a landowner over and steal away from him his hard work and promise of success.
Confession time: I have been a scary person when encountering trespassers and poachers (scary to them and often to me). Not long ago a warden asked me to consider becoming a deputy warden, and I responded that I could not do that, because I get so angry at trespassers and game thieves that it would be unbecoming to see someone in an official uniform lose their cool. Yes, I have had people charged in court, but often my hand tightly around someone’s shirt collar while they get roughly dragged off the property is enough to convince trespassers that other venues hold more promise and less danger. I don’t know if many other landowners operate this way, but I am super old school. A facility with firearms and knowledge of the law also helps build confidence when dealing with armed trespassers and poachers.
As one state trooper said to a trespasser I had roughly collared, “Yes, Josh is armed. But YOU are armed, too. Is he supposed to let you shoot him so you can make your getaway? Here is your citation, do not come back here.”
Some people trespass because they are looking for things to steal, including rare plants or animals, or to drive off wild game they don’t want the landowner to get. Others trespass so they can poach wildlife through illegal hunting. Others may simply get a jolt of excitment, or are simply curious.
Folks, trespassing and poaching are a really big deal. Some landowners make a significant income from leasing their hunting land, and poachers undermine that investment. Some landowners treasure their privacy, and seeing an armed thief skulking around their property makes them feel directly threatened. So don’t do it. Don’t think it is no big deal to slip past the No Trespassing purple paint or sign and “just take my gun for a walk” or take a Sunday drive up that posted driveway.
That walk that comes so casually to you, the trespasser, comes at someone else’s expense, even if you do not see it right then. And it could end up costing you everything. No wild game animal is worth getting in trouble over, and certainly not losing your life or mobility for.
The answer to the temptation to trespass on private land is to listen to that little voice in the back of your mind warning you not to take the chance. Go to public lands for your hunting and fishing adventures. Here in Pennsylvania, public lands are super abundant. If you don’t like sharing public lands with the general public, why then, go buy yourself a piece of land and make it your very own wildlife sanctuary.
Had the once popular John Dillinger stopped robbing banks when he made that cute quip of his, he could have easily slipped away into anonymity and comfortable living, or even into celebrity and wealthy living as a free man. But he pushed it too far, and paid the ultimate price. Like too many thieves pay every day….Guys, don’t trespass and don’t poach.
And yes, baiting is a form of poaching and wild game theft. Don’t do it.
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UPDATE December 2, 2024: Today I was sitting on a remote hillside in Northcentral Pennsylvania, with a rifle across my knees, overlooking private land surrounded by about two million acres of public land, enjoying the snow-covered serenity. Suddenly, loud voices approaching from behind grabbed my attention. Through a normally silent piece of state forest emerged four young men, in hunter orange and preparing to drive off the piece of private land.
Looking at the leader, who was giving specific directions about how to spread out and push the deer off the private land, I turned to face all of them and asked “Did we grant you permission to hunt here?”
“I mean, we have a bunch of people down in there right now, deer hunting, and they don’t expect to have anyone walking through.”
The curse-word filled abuse heaped on me caught me off guard. Me, easily the age of the fathers of these four young men, very much their elder and merely a private landowner asking an elementary question that any landowner would ask of uninvited guests, was now the bad guy.
“Eff you” Eff this” “Eff him” “Eff that” were the nicer things said to me as the young men checked that the boundary was clearly marked and backed up and regrouped.
I do not know or understand who raises such poorly behaved and aggressive young men, but for those who are inclined to ascribe poor behavior only to people with dark skin, I am here to tell you these were four white guys. Out in the middle of the big nowhere, armed with rifles, and acting like a criminal gang. With all their anger, I wondered if one of them was going to shoot me in the back.
They had already loudly walked a half mile from their remote parking spot (that itself is a long and arduous drive to reach) through laurel-choked oak woods that normally is full of deer, as the abundant deer tracks in the deep snow attested to. What if these four “hunters” had done a silent deer drive from their vehicle out to the private land they intended to sneak on? They might have already bagged a deer. Instead, they talked so loudly, so boisterously, for so long, that I thought they much have been forest workers. Never in my life have I heard hunters this loud in the woods.
Their behavior makes no sense, unless their goal was simply to spoil the posted private land that they already know is off-limits and that they were jealous of and wanted to ruin for hunting by anyone else….
Halfway through PA deer season
We are halfway through deer season, and I, having hunted in several counties in Northcentral and southcentral Pennsylvania, have a few observations. These might be helpful to those seeking to fill tags this coming week, or to policy makers trying to mould a better season next year.
a) Despite the “purple paint law,” which is Pennsylvania’s new private land trespass law that carries severe penalties for trespassing, PA hunters continue to trespass and poach and shoot deer on private lands they have no business being on. So far this season I have been witness to the deliberate taking of deer on private land by people who have no right to hunt there, both a buck and a doe. One incident was just plain sloppy woodsmanship; the other was purposefully crafty. Some trespassers are habitual lawbreakers, who trespass more to get one over (in their warped thinking) on someone who has land, rather than to actually pursue a specific trophy animal or meat for their family. This blurs into the mental illness category. Others are defiant individuals, who have always had authority problems both at work and elsewhere. This also blurs into the mental disease category. The antidote to all this miserable behavior is the joy of hidden trail cameras, which have caught several malefactors in flagrante. Yeah, Jon, you….again. To be continued!
b) Pennsylvania is now a huge deer trophy destination. The trophy bucks that are being taken from archery season, when deer are at their most vulnerable, right through rifle season, would have been unimaginable twenty or forty years ago. The enormous heads (antlers/ racks scoring 140 inches and above) that are being taken by hunters everywhere across the state are easily on par with famous trophy destination states like Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, and Kansas.
This development is a looooong way from the spike bucks and “trophy” fork horns of my youth, and frankly to which too many older hunters would gladly return.
This exciting development is primarily a result of top-notch deer management by the Pennsylvania Game Commission over the past twenty years. Along that twenty-year-way, PGC has suffered a lot of abuse for its deer management, which always involved reducing the number of over-abundant does and retaining a high number of mature bucks to return again next year, with racks that have gone from OK to spectacular. People upset with PGC were long accustomed to “seeing” lots of deer. These people incorrectly equated overabundant deer with a healthy deer population, because, in fact, the truth is the opposite. Too many deer is unhealthy for not only deer, but for a boatload of other animals, and plants, that everybody other than deer needs. Deer diseases like TB and CWD are a result of deer populations too high for their own good. So is the deer-car-collision disease, which is crazy high in PA.
We have to kill a lot more deer. PGC knew that and started it in 2000, and it was a slow and painful process that necessitated an entire cultural shift among tradition-bound hunters.
However, PGC alone doesn’t get all the credit for these big bucks, even though the agency has carried the torch of scientific wildlife management through a hailstorm of undeserved crap. Another reason Pennsylvania has so many massive trophy bucks roaming around is that we have a lot fewer hunters and less hunting pressure over the past five years, and over the past fifty years. There is a big difference between someone who buys a hunting license, because he has been proudly buying a license every year since 1962, as it is part of his personal identity, and someone who buys a hunting license with the intention of squeezing out many of its benefits and opportunities, such as climbing high into remote places in pursuit of huge bucks.
Buying a hunting license is a tradition among many older Pennsylvanians, even if they don’t actually hunt much or at all with it.
If I can think off-hand of five hunters I know who will comment on the dearth of deer hunters seen in the more remote places, I can probably easily find five hundred others who will testify to far less hunting pressure in most places, not just the remote ones. This means that old bucks with big trophy racks have more secret places to go where they can go on growing old, without dying of sudden acute lead poisoning from a hunter standing downwind behind a tree. As the population of really older bucks continues to climb, they begin to spill out into more accessible and less topographically challenged places, where the average Hunter Joes can now occasionally pick one off for the local newspaper’s front page.
c) I miss John R. Johnson as my long time knife maker of choice. John took a break from making his beautiful custom knives about five years ago, and fortunate are those of us who bought his highest-quality products while we could. While it is possible to hunt with a hunk of basic soft steel half-assedly made into a rough knife shape in China, why should we? Ever since the dawn of our species, a hunter-gatherer species, our hunters have ALWAYS prided themselves on the high quality of their weapons and accoutrements. Having a nice rifle and a nice knife is a source of great pleasure for every hunter I know, and most aspire to having the best they can stretch to afford. That is to their individual credit and to our collective credit, as a sign of sophistication and high performance. So if you are fortunate enough to find a JRJ hunting knife somewhere, buy it right away. Cherish it, keep it sharp and well, and use it. It is a product of one of our central Pennsylvania native sons, and a true embodiment of the rugged character and values we here in central Pennsylvania cherish.