80 



life Service with a requirement that Federal agents must notify 

 landowners of properties managed for wildlife in advance of the 

 hunting season, when and if there is some question of baiting. 



To prevent these Federal agents from shutting down properties 

 willy-nilly, they must work with and have the approval to post a 

 property off-limits to hunters by a State conservation officer. If bait 

 is merely dumped out after the season begins, State and Federal 

 agents will continue to have the right to cite such violations but 

 always in close conjunction with State conservation officers. 



This prevention-oriented approach would have several positive 

 results. First, the policy constitutes genuine conservation. Com- 

 mando tactics do not. With few, if any, innocent bystanders caught 

 up in stings, the hunting tradition will be better-served and its 

 wellspring of conservation dollars better-preserved. Second, by 

 avoiding confrontation and headlines. Federal agents would recover 

 some measure of the respect they have lost among many sports- 

 men. Third, a policy of prevention will ultimately result in fewer 

 baiting violations, because the states will develop a clearer inter- 

 pretation of the rules than Federal agents, many of whom feel that 

 they have no need to maintain good relations with local citizens. 



For too many decades, hunters have been haunted by baiting 

 regulations in which they have borne a burden of strict liability. It 

 is long past time, both for the sake of hunting as well as for the 

 birds themselves, to make diplomacy the number one priority of 

 wardens and to shift the burden of proof and of intent back to the 

 Government where it belongs. 



I would like to add two items in response to Congressman Mil- 

 ler's driving analogy. First of all, hunting is not something we have 

 to do. Driving, our license to drive, is working papers in this soci- 

 ety. We have all been caught in entrapment cases involving driving 

 offenses, where speed limits go from 55 to 30, and there is a cop 

 waiting behind the bushes to collect his share. 



In hunting, when someone is caught in that situation, he may 

 give up hunting. He feels humiliated. In many cases, he did not 

 know he was violating the law. If he gives hunting up, we lose 

 those conservation dollars. In the case of a driving violation, we 

 simply grin and bear the fine. 



The other thing that occurs to me in response to the driving 

 analogy is to ask Federal law enforcement agents how much of a 

 threat to their well-being is the ordinary hunter, compared to the 

 speeding motorist that a State trooper stops in the middle of the 

 night? I dare say that most wardens would admit they feel a lot 

 safer around hunters, who are normally law-abiding people. Let us 

 be honest, the days of the great outlaw hunters are pretty much 

 over. Mainly, the cases being made today have to do with baiting 

 irregularities. But coming up on somebody in the middle of the 

 night, and you do not know what he is carrying in the car or how 

 sauced up he is, that may be a real threatening situation. For war- 

 dens to say that a field of hunters represents the same threat, I 

 resent that as a hunter, and I think that is part of our image prob- 

 lem, part of the problem between hunters and law enforcement 

 agencies. 



Thank you very much, sir. 



