Herman Lenz, Merle Wilson, and Laurie Crawford Stone have been supplying
C.A.S.H. with information about the Iowa game agencies and their victims
(the hunted, victimized companion animals, and property owner victims) for a
long time. We are grateful to them for sharing their personal harrowing
experiences, insights, and their perseverance.
Thanks to Herman Lenz, we sent a postcard mailing to our IA members as
follows. Please take action on behalf of the IA wildlife.
Dear Friend,
Would you like to see hunters who trespass upon and/or shoot into private
property face a felony rather than a misdemeanor charge?
Property owners are at risk, and in some documented cases they have been
charged with hunter harassment for ordering armed individuals off their
land. Shockingly, law enforcement agents have often sided with the hunter
and not the property owner!
We urge you to contact your IA legislators to ask that they remove any
provision from the concealed carry law or other law that would allow loaded
rifles and shotguns to be carried in vehicles. These provisions encourage
spontaneous shooting of wildlife and concomitant trespass, thus endangering
the public, companion and agricultural animals, and wildlife.
Please contact your legislators to let them know that you are counting on
them to protect property owners from armed hunters trespassing and shooting
onto their property by changing the penalty to a felony for such violations
of law to a felony. Contact the Iowa Legislative Information Office at (515)
281-5129 or
lioinfo@legis.state.ia.us for your elected official’s contact
information. Please let us know if we can be of further help to you.
Joe Miele, President, C.A.S.H.
cash@abolishsporthunting.org
Merle Wilson let us know that the Department of Natural Resources (DNR)
has proposed a "new three-year $2.2 million pilot program to open up private
land for public hunting. The Farm Bureau itself urged their members to
OPPOSE this program proposal saying the following:
"The official program proposal is alarmingly short on details. It doesn’t
give landowners absolute liability protection from lawsuits, including ones
resulting from personal injuries and property damage caused by hunters. And
it doesn’t address other important issues for participating landowners,
including cost-share, incentive rates, contract cancellation process and
penalties, weed control, law enforcement responsibilities, limits on hunting
in standing crops and possible land management or endangered species
restrictions.
It also creates another program to fund while the state government tries
to cope with a $263 million budget shortfall and the DNR’s Fish and Wildlife
Trust Fund remains on pace to run out of funding in 2014!!!!!
The letter was sent by:
Zach Bader,
Grassroots Program Manager,
Iowa Farm
Bureau.
Hooray for Zach!
Merle wrote: "I for one will not do any business with the DNR!" Yay,
Merle!!!!
.
