It may not matter anyway. I have heard that Pennsylvania poaching laws are toothless. Here's an article on that very thing:


[align=center]Pa. poaching fines may go way up
[/align][align=center] By Deborah Weisberg
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Southwest Correspondent Thursday, January 31, 2008 10:58 AM CST Pittsburgh - While hunters lament the low number of white-tailed deer in some parts of Pennsylvania, poachers are having a field day.

Laws without teeth and archaic fines have made the state - second only to Texas in the number of licenses sold - an easy mark for those who thrill kill, hoard antlers or supply animal parts to black marketeers.

“You could poach 100 deer and be convicted and you'd never spend a day in jail because there's no provision for incarceration in the Game Code,” said Rich Palmer, director of wildlife protection for the Pennsylvania Game Commission, the state's wildlife management and enforcement authority.

“Game violations are summary offenses, the same as littering or running a stop sign. Fines aren't even equitable to 1913, when it was $100 for unlawfully taking a deer.”

Pennsylvania game laws and penalties are set by the Pennsylvania Legislature and approved by the governor. Despite penalties that Palmer said are weak compared with those of other states, the Game Commission has not forcefully sought stiffer fines from lawmakers.

But that may be about to change. With mounting grassroots support that includes the Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsmen's Clubs, Palmer will make the case for an overhaul of state game laws Feb. 7, when he appears before the House Game and Fisheries Committee in Harrisburg.

It's the first time a package of this magnitude has been proposed since recodification of game laws in the 1980s, and the first step in convincing legislators that offenses should be misdemeanors - in some cases, felonies - with the prospect of imprisonment and stiffer fines.

Committee chairman Rep. Ed Staback, D-Lackawanna and Wayne counties, has drafted a proposal that reflects those changes. An aide to the representative said they expected the bill to be introduced well in advance of the Feb. 7 hearing.

“We'll include new offenses for multiple violations,” said Staback, in a prepared statement, “and increase the pool of money within the game fund to pay out rewards for information.”

Melody Zullinger, executive director of the Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsmen's Clubs, also will testify Feb. 7, along with representatives of the Humane Society of the United States.

“What we've been seeing for years in Pennsylvania is repeat offenders,” Zullinger said. “No jail time has made poaching a revolving door.”

A case in point is that of Richard Stoy, a Blair County man convicted of 50 game law violations over 11 years, including 40 for the unlawful taking of trophy bucks.

“He had his hunting license revoked to the year 2060 and kept on poaching and getting arrested,” said Palmer. “He only stopped poaching when he was incarcerated for other crimes having nothing to do with hunting. Otherwise, we could never have thrown him in jail. Of the $14,900 in fines he owed, less than half has ever been paid.”

Laws are lax and each wildlife conservation officer in the agency's 136 field districts has to patrol an average of 375 square miles. When poachers are caught and hauled to court, they often get off easy for all but the most egregious offenses, Palmer said. In 2004, state lawmakers gave district justices wider latitude in assigning penalties in hopes they would begin imposing at least a small fine in cases they might have otherwise dismissed.

“And that's exactly what happens,” Palmer said. “Guys usually get the low-end fine, which is $300.”

Some people outside the hunting community may be indifferent to the state's relaxed penalties, harboring what Palmer calls an “it's just an animal” mindset. But wild game is a constitutionally protected resource, he said, and illegally taking them is tantamount to acts of grand larceny or theft from the citizens of Pennsylvania.

Other states seem to recognize that, given their laws and penalty structures.

“If you kill a black bear in closed season in West Virginia, the first offense is $5,000 and 30 days in jail,” Palmer said. “Here, the range is $500 to $1,500 and no jail time. Poaching a deer at night in Maryland is $2,000 to $4,000 and up to a year in jail. Here, the maximum is $800, although it's seldom given, and no jail time.”

Pennsylvania is one of just nine states not included in the Interstate Wildlife Violator Compact, in which member states share information about game law violators and deny licenses to those whose hunting privileges have been revoked by any state in the compact.

New Jersey is the only state bordering Pennsylvania that isn't a member. Palmer said the commission has asked the Legislature to seek the commonwealth's admission to the compact, but Harrisburg has so far rebuffed initiatives that would put Pennsylvania in the loop.

In too many cases, said Palmer, fines aren't severe enough to discourage violations.

“Our penalties aren't deterrents,” said Palmer. “They're not working.”

In the Game Commission's license year that ended in June 2007, more than 16,000 violations were encountered by wildlife conservation officers, resulting in 7,123 successful prosecutions. (Often, violators of minor infractions get off with warnings). Almost 43 percent of total violations related to unlawful taking of wildlife, such as hunting out of season, exceeding bag limits and “jack lighting,” a practice that originated with pioneers who cruised riverbanks for deer at night with pitch pine torches on the bows of their canoes.

Then, the motive was to gather food. Today it often is greed, an obsession with antlers or a warped sense of status, Palmer said.

Poaching is big business for some, and the cost of doing it in Pennsylvania is low.

“One of the reasons people come here to poach is they know they won't be thrown in jail,” said Staback. “They can pay a low fine and poach again.”

Several years ago, a New Jersey man was busted for selling 90 black bear gallbladders to an undercover game officer in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains. Most of the organs were not taken from bears killed here. Under Pennsylvania law, he could not have been jailed for possession of so many animal parts. He was subject to imprisonment, however, on a federal felony charge of crossing state lines to deal in contraband. He settled out of court.

Bear parts, including skulls and paws, are coveted in a billion-dollar global underground that caters to restaurants and practitioners of traditional Asian medicine. Gallbladders with a $150 street value in Pennsylvania have more value than heroin or gold in the end market, Palmer said.

“Venison is an even hotter commodity. Aside from the guy selling meat out of his basement, you've got guys selling it to high-end restaurants in D.C. and New York, which will pay $25 a pound for venison loins. If you get 30 pounds of prime meat out of the average deer, you'll make $300 on one animal.”

But profit isn't every poacher's motive. Some are hoarders, which Palmer called “the creepiest.”

“They're totally obsessed,” he said, “and would shoot a trophy buck in the middle of suburbia with kids on swing sets and a dozen witnesses around.”

One of the state's more infamous hoarding cases involved a Fulton County man found with 100 pounds of antlers and 54 turkey beards in his home, plus a diary that detailed the killing of more than 300 animals, beginning when he was just 13 years old.

“That was the spooky part. Someone ought to do an analysis between serial poachers and serial killers,” said Palmer. “They'd probably find a whole bunch of analogies, like keeping diaries of their crimes and trophies of their victims.”

Palmer said proposed new penalties for poaching would impact the most egregious violators as well as less flagrant and accidental poachers. And surprisingly, he said, it isn't only a backwoods problem.

“If you think poaching is just a rural thing where someone on the low end of the socio-economic scale needs meat for the freezer, nothing could be further from the truth,” he said. “Cities and suburbs have become havens for trophy bucks and there are people taking them illegally. These (guys) aren't Robin Hoods. They're bad guys.”

Link: http://www.paoutdoornews.com/article...ews/news03.txt