Just a few weeks after a judge in Poplar Bluff made the strange ruling that state laws banning the use of dogs and vehicles while deer hunting were too vague to enforce, seven southeastern Missouri hunters have pleaded guilty to awfully similar federal charges of conspiracy to hunt with dogs.
The lazy man's hunting tactic has been outlawed in Missouri since before wildlife officials can even remember, but the Missouri Department of Conservation says that more cases of deer dogging are working through the courts, and additional guilty pleas are likely.
The guilty pleas stem from a joint operation called "Pulling Wool" between the
Missouri Department of Conservation's Special Investigations Unit and
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in November 2008. The classy hunters
(who should forever lose the title of "sportsmen" for this) were among
dozens busted releasing dogs into Mark Twain National Forest to flush
deer out and force them toward the hunters, some of whom were using
all-terrain vehicles.
But these guys weren't
moonshine-swilling, anti-federal government yahoos on four-wheelers
picking off whitetails. They were crafty criminals who apparently knew what they were doing was illegal because they took
measures to cover their figurative tracks. They outfitted their dogs
with radio collars, so they could easily use radio telemetry to track
them and follow where they were driving the freaked out prey. But the
true genius of their little criminal operation was that rather than
using common civilian radio bands, they used marine-band radios to track their pack, communicate with each other, and tip hunters off to the locations
of wildlife officials. Very sneaky.
The Missouri Department of Conservation says dozens of hunters were picked up during Pulling Wool, and the feds are just getting to them now. The Department of Justice says the seven -- from
Doniphan, Naylor, Cape Girardeau and Fairdealing -- will pay fines between
$500 and $1,500.
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