Former Corrections Officer Hit with Lifetime Hunting Ban and $114K in Fines 💸

I’m currently at the “it’s Thursday already?” phase of the workweek and am unsure as to whether or not that is a good thing as of yet.

With that in mind, let’s all take a minute to grab a coffee or whiskey (no judgement) and get this Thursday morning dispatch out the door.

Here's what's worth reading about today:

NOT ABOVE THE LAW
FORMER OREGON CORRECTIONS OFFICER HIT WITH LIFETIME HUNTING BAD AND $114K IN FINES FOR POACHING SPREE

For a man whose professional life once involved keeping people on the straight and narrow, a former Oregon Department of Corrections officer found himself on the other side of the law and is now set to pay the price for it. In a strong example of stellar wildlife enforcement, 48-year-old Christopher George Matson just got hit with a lifetime hunting ban and over $114,000 in fines for what can only be described as a prolific, multi-year poaching operation.

Turns out the real recidivism problem wasn’t inside the prison walls…

✊ Oregon Sportsmen Counter Radical Ban Petition with Constitutional Right to Hunt and Fish. Oregon’s animal rights activists just got a taste of their own medicine — and it’s deliciously constitutional.

While Initiative Petition 28 (the so-called PEACE Act) gathers signatures to effectively criminalize hunting, fishing, trapping, and even parts of farming by stripping away long-standing animal cruelty exemptions, a counter-petition is already in motion. Initiative Petition 25, dubbed the Freedom Amendment (hell yeah), seeks to enshrine hunting, fishing, farming, livestock raising, and wildlife management as protected rights in the Oregon Constitution.

The message is clear: If extremists want to rewrite the rules of engagement, traditional Oregonians will simply raise the stakes to the constitutional level. The proposal frames these activities as essential to the state’s economy, self-reliance, cultural heritage, and (most importantly) freedom.

Even Oregon’s Democratic heavyweights (Governor Tina Kotek, House leadership, and Senator Ron Wyden) have distanced themselves from the radical ban petition, calling it a bridge too far. Turns out trying to turn responsible hunters and anglers into felons doesn’t poll as well as the activists hoped.

🌄 Montana Proposal Opens Prime Elk Country with 3652-Acre Conservation Easement in the Big Snowies. A promising conservation move in central Montana could open up significantly better public access for elk hunters in the Big Snowy Mountains.

Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks is proposing a 99-year conservation easement on 3,652 acres of the Hannah Ranch, located about six miles south of Moore in Fergus County. The property sits on the northwest corner of the Big Snowy Mountains and would give hunters and outdoor users the only reasonable public access point to the far western end of the range — an area that has long been considered difficult to reach.

The easement would allow the current owners to retain ownership of the timberlands while preventing subdivision or development. It would also protect critical wildlife habitat and secure permanent public access to roughly 120,000 acres of adjacent national forest land in the Big Snowys. Given that FWP estimated the elk population in the Snowys to be the second largest in the state, elk remain the primary draw, but the area also supports a variety of other game species as well.

FWP has appraised the deal at approximately $3.56 million and public comments are now being accepted as part of the review process.

🧑‍⚖️ B.C. Hunting Guides Hit with 30K in Fines for Illegal Moose and Caribou Harvest. In September 2022, hunting guide Gregory Williams and his assistant Tanner Vandenhoven found themselves on the wrong side of a wildlife case near Telegraph Creek. The result? A combined $30,000 in fines for a messy bull moose and caribou harvest that checked nearly every box on the violation list.

Investigators found no tags cancelled, edible meat not fully recovered, a caribou that wasn’t of legal configuration, and no evidence of sex attached to the carcasses. Williams pleaded guilty to two counts of failing to immediately cancel species licences and took a $20,000 hit. Assistant guide Vandenhoven got $10,000 plus a one-year guiding ban in B.C. for killing out of season (caribou) and failing to salvage meat (moose).

Nearly all the money ($29,996) is heading straight to the Habitat Conservation Trust Foundation.

🥵 Sometimes you’ve just got to find a way to beat the damn heat. Watch as this black bear takes advantage of a backyard hose in Asheville and damn near has a full-fledged shower.

You can tell by the way that he’s drinking out of the hose that he was likely born before 1992…

🧘 Feral Enlightenment: Below us, Texas stretched to every horizon in shades of brown and gold. Mesquite trees. Dirt roads. Oil pumps nodding like exhausted old men. Somewhere down there were feral hogs, which Texans discussed with the same combination of annoyance and fascination that New Jersey people reserved for traffic.

The pilot banked hard. I looked down.

Then the ayahuasca decided to reopen negotiations with reality. The scrubland began breathing. Not metaphorically. Literally breathing.

Entire fields expanded and contracted beneath us. Creeks turned into veins. Roads became neural pathways. The state of Texas revealed itself as a gigantic living organism, and we were flying through its bloodstream carrying automatic rifles.

“Hogs!” the pilot yelled. Read the full story.

🧐 Curiosity Killed the Pheasant: We really didn’t know which path to take. A rooster could have been in any direction. This was the last day of pheasant season in Indiana, at the bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, and I was looking for a Hoosier home run.

My dog, Creek, had already stuck a point on a healthy covey of bobwhites early that morning. I took a handsome male from it and relished finding them this far north. But pheasants were the centerpiece for this excursion. We were hunting a sizable wetland conservation area that supposedly held a few birds. My hunting partners and I stood at the edge of a small drainage, curious about which way to go. I wondered where an old, wily rooster could be camped out.

Unsure, but needing to make a choice, we crossed the water and continued straight.  Read the full story.

🌾 Snippets on Snipe : Our group had just finished walking a tract of grass, interspersed with islands of waist-high weeds. We were on the hunt for wily pheasant roosters and had come to an edge and could see that for us to continue, we would have to get wet. Walking would have to be done in mucky water. We started to pick our way through the soft, marshy landscape, each step unsteady. The unknown depth of the flooded field caused careful choices in our boot placement.

Our ragtag band of bird hunters was after long-tails that had moved into the flooded marshland to evade bird hunters. It’s not totally unheard of for pheasants to relocate to shallow water to escape–another natural line of defense that those evasive ringnecks had was all the darn mosquitos that were unusually present during a warm mid-November. Read the full story.

Oh, and one more thing…