Rich Landers: There’s a big population of small-time poachers

This planet would be a better place to live if we could eliminate poachers.

But it would be lonesome.

A poacher is someone who kills fish or wildlife illegally. The most notorious poachers are those despicable bandits who slaughter grizzly bears, bald eagles, alligators, elephants, rhinos and other protected species to sell their body parts on the black market.

Some unscrupulous guides sneak high-rollers into national parks or other restricted areas to bag trophy big game, such as elk or bighorn sheep.

A public poll doubtless would find overwhelming support for locking these criminals behind bars.

But what do we do with the poacher next door?

We don’t seem to have such contempt for the old man who kills the great horned owl – a protected species – that’s terrorizing his bird feeder.

Small-time poaching is the wildlife-world’s equivalent of shoplifting – which, incidentally, takes a $25 billion bite out of annual U.S. retailer profits a little nibble at a time. Yet, apparently, few of us see poaching as being serious business.

Unless you wear blinders, you cannot spend much time at a popular lake on opening day of Washington’s fishing season without seeing somebody taking more than his limit of trout.

I once watched a well-known Spokane professional purposely shoot a hen pheasant on a slow day of hunting. He said he was frustrated and needed to kill something. I left him and another hunting companion just after my Brittany took a leak on his shotgun behind his back while he was eating a sandwich. I never called to hunt with him again, but I didn’t report him.

Another acquaintance, who incidentally is an outspoken critic of hunting, has rationalized his weakness for exceeding the limit of salmon. “I figure if I travel all the way over to the Olympic Peninsula once or twice a year, I deserve to take more than my limit,” he told me.

A Sprague-area farmer invited me out to his farm one summer to burn my ear about thoughtless hunters. As we drove along, he pointed to one area and said, “That’s where a friend and I killed 40 ducks between us one day. We plucked feathers all night,” he boasted.

That’s roughly 26 ducks over the daily limit for two men even during the most liberal hunting seasons in decades.

But he thought nothing of telling me about it.

Elk poachers were nabbed by the bagful earlier this month when Idaho Fish and Game Department officers staked out an elk decoy along roads known to harbor illegal activity.

They wrote eight tickets the first day and seven the next. Considering the time it takes to write up an incident, you have to assume that nearly every rig that went by that bogus elk included somebody willing to shoot from a vehicle or at night or whatever it took to be able to say he got his elk.

I joined Washington wildlife agents years ago as they staked out a rooster pheasant decoy off a road on posted land near Rosalia. I don’t think a topless waitress could have caused more vehicles to stop for a look, and most of the road hunters took a shot.

One ticket was written to a woman who taught school in one of the nearby small towns.

Some officials from the Washington Fish and Wildlife Department estimate the illegal take of some fish and wildlife by poacher approaches the legal harvest taken by sportsmen.

The dirty deeds aren’t just the work of big-time criminals.

A University of Idaho study completed in the early 1990s probed the thoughts of poachers who have never been caught.

Prof. Gary Machlis and his researchers gained the confidence of ordinary people, promised anonymity and queried them for hours in various sessions.

Researchers found it fairly easy to find poachers from just about any group, including men and women, elementary school educators to Ph.D.s.

Most of the people who admitted poaching activity also hunted legally.

Many of the people involved began poaching when they were young, about the time they started hunting. Some of them never learned a great distinction between hunting and poaching.

Perhaps required hunter education courses are tackling that problem. Maybe not.

Machlis said he was inspired to start the tedious research after the trial of Claude Dallas, a poacher who had wide support from the rural community of Southern Idaho even after he was convicted of the 1981 killing of two Idaho Fish and Game officers.

That trial was a significant event in Idaho wildlife history, teaching us that attitudes toward poaching aren’t black and white.

But despite the research and the heads up, the poacher next door is doing just fine, thank you.