The Farmville Herald And Farmer Leader

By Ted Kesting

For something that's supposed to be recreation our field sports are hedged in with an awful lot of restrictions. It's all too easy to break a law wittingly or unwittingly each time you go afield. The beef here is that the laws on the statute books are too complex and too many, are becoming more complex and more numerous each year, and are sometimes foolish to the point of absurdity.

Here's the situation. You buy a license and get a leaflet containing a summary of the laws. There is nothing wrong with this. The summary ordinarily tells what is in season and when, outlines a few major restrictions on how game or fish can be taken and that's all.

But now let's say you get curious about some point of law that puzzles you, and you ask for one of the larger booklet to clarify the laws. Man, you're just asking for confusion according to Bill Wolf, who recently undertook a study of game laws for Sports Afield magazine.

When these publications are complete reprints of statutes affecting wildlife, they make sense only to the legal mind and are useful only to officials who must deal with violators. When these publications are summaries of state statutes, they serve only to annoy because they outline carefully what you may not do and seldom give a summary of what you may do.

Now you can't convict a man of any crime unless the law states specifically what that crime is. So it is necessary to say in the laws themselves what "thou shalt not." But is it necessary to confound the average sportsman with this legalese?

If the legal method of taking fish and game is put forth clearly for public distribution, why enumerate all the illegal methods? It is just a waste of space; in fact, the "thou shalt not" sections of many codes are a complete course on taking game by non-sporting methods, many of which would not even occur to the average law-breaker.

The least that we hunters and fisherman with nonlegal minds can ask is that when we buy our licenses, our states will furnish us a booklet telling us in simple English only what is legal. We can just assume anything else is illegal.