If you’ve been paying attention to my many rants on poachers over the years you know that I’m all for stiff punishments in deliberate and heinous poaching cases. I’m talking about the deliberate theft of wildlife from the public trust, not about the hunter who accidentally kills a hen pheasant or a sub-legal mule deer buck and reports themselves. Honest mistakes happen but premeditated acts of poaching, no matter the motive, are exactly what I labeled them above, theft, plain and simple.
That said, I cannot help but having noticed some disparities in punishments between types of game animals. This past week I posted the results of a waterfowl poaching case from Michigan on the Wingmen Facebook Page. It received a ton of traffic and generated a lot of comments, spurring some excellent dialogue. The case in question was most certainly premeditated and a piggish display of human greed as the three poachers killed birds far in excess of their bag limits. The punishments include nearly $20k in restitution, permanent forfeiture of the guns used and the loss of hunting rights for roughly one year. I personally think they got off easy! That said, the day after I posted the news release on Facebook another Michigan poaching case popped up, this time it was an elk poaching case.
Now before some of you walk away saying, “Michigan? Who cares?” I think it’s important to note that cases like these happen all across the country and are perhaps more impactful in the West as our big game herds produce vast amounts of monetary value for the states in which they reside making losing animals to poaching a pretty serious cut out of local economies. But here’s where my real question comes to bear. The elk poachers in Michigan are serving six months probation, loss of hunting privileges for 15 years (which I do not believe works, these aren’t hunters to begin with), and a $625 fine. They must also reimburse the people of Michigan $5K for the three elk killed.