Local residents act quickly to inform Idaho Fish and Game-
This is a very strange story, but glad for the alert citizens. Why would elk ranchers poach an elk? But they did. They plead “guilty.”
Residents help Fish and Game nab poachers near Albion. By Andrew Weeks – Times-News writer Magicvalley.com
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Just noticed, but it seems like there is an outrageous poaching story almost every day lately.
Ralph Maughan
Dr. Ralph Maughan is professor emeritus of political science at Idaho State University. He has been a Western Watersheds Project Board Member off and on for many years, and also its President. For many years he produced Ralph Maughan's Wolf Report. He was a founder of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. He and Jackie Johnson Maughan wrote three editions of "Hiking Idaho." He also wrote "Beyond the Tetons" and "Backpacking Wyoming's Teton and Washakie Wilderness." He created and is the administrator of The Wildlife News.
These guys have done this before. I think if the truth were known, some of the other poaching cases involve repeat offenders(Save Elk, Rammel, and others), that just didn’t get caught in their previous wildlife poaching activities.
If you scoff at a law once, you’ll pretty much sure to do it again. If you scoff at one law, you’re pretty sure to scoff at others. Once you break a law, that’s a crime and once you commit a crime, you’re a criminal. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a big law or a little law or whether you think it’s a bad law or a good law or whether you like local laws better than national laws. It doesn’t matter that you love your mother, are good to your children, or worship each and every Sabbath. It doesn’t even matter whether it’s a law your great-grandfather obeyed or not. I really can’t see that it matters whether the animal you poached is a trophy or just a calf. If you break the law or even if, like Otter, you just incite others to break the law, it’s all the same. Trash is trash.