AMonger
Veteran Expediter
I don't know if this particular board is the right place for this thread. Feel free to move it.
I was passing through North Dakota, went into a truckstop for some coffee, and noticed immediately that except for the employees, I might well have been the only person there not wearing blaze orange. The roads are full of hunting vehicles, many with bucks in the bed or strapped somewhere. Listening to local radio, the talk is all about hunting. They turned to a discussion of hunting laws and regulations.
One such regulation says that if you, a duly licensed hunter, hunting in a place you may lawfully hunt, shoot a buck and it runs off onto private land, the owner of the land may not prevent you from going on his land to retrieve it. If he denies you, you're supposed to call a game warden. That surprised me.
Another was the issue of transporting someone else's kill, say if you have a truck and the guy who shot it wants you to help transport it. Apparently there are rules for that, too.
I realize this isn't a libertarian country, but it is supposed to be a free country, and many of the laws I heard of are very much anti-freedom.
The phrase "caught red-handed" has it's roots back in the jolly-ol', a reference to "caught with the blood of the king's deer on his hands," a reference to poaching. All wildlife was said to belong to the king. Looking at laws like the above, it looks like that's the principle at work here in America today--that all the deer belong to the State, and we take them at the State's pleasure. That doesn't sound like America, land of the free, to me.
I realize that if there were no laws, some people would take all the deer they could get, all year-around, and soon there'd be no deer (not that that would bother me, seeing as non-existent deer can't run out in front of my van at night, scaring the crap out of me or damaging my van), so if we're going to have deer around, some system has to exist. I'm just not sure that it's this way. In fact, I'm sure the way it's regulated now is horribly wrong. I just don't know what the right way would look like.
Any comments on how hunting laws should be?
I was passing through North Dakota, went into a truckstop for some coffee, and noticed immediately that except for the employees, I might well have been the only person there not wearing blaze orange. The roads are full of hunting vehicles, many with bucks in the bed or strapped somewhere. Listening to local radio, the talk is all about hunting. They turned to a discussion of hunting laws and regulations.
One such regulation says that if you, a duly licensed hunter, hunting in a place you may lawfully hunt, shoot a buck and it runs off onto private land, the owner of the land may not prevent you from going on his land to retrieve it. If he denies you, you're supposed to call a game warden. That surprised me.
Another was the issue of transporting someone else's kill, say if you have a truck and the guy who shot it wants you to help transport it. Apparently there are rules for that, too.
I realize this isn't a libertarian country, but it is supposed to be a free country, and many of the laws I heard of are very much anti-freedom.
The phrase "caught red-handed" has it's roots back in the jolly-ol', a reference to "caught with the blood of the king's deer on his hands," a reference to poaching. All wildlife was said to belong to the king. Looking at laws like the above, it looks like that's the principle at work here in America today--that all the deer belong to the State, and we take them at the State's pleasure. That doesn't sound like America, land of the free, to me.
I realize that if there were no laws, some people would take all the deer they could get, all year-around, and soon there'd be no deer (not that that would bother me, seeing as non-existent deer can't run out in front of my van at night, scaring the crap out of me or damaging my van), so if we're going to have deer around, some system has to exist. I'm just not sure that it's this way. In fact, I'm sure the way it's regulated now is horribly wrong. I just don't know what the right way would look like.
Any comments on how hunting laws should be?
