Hunting laws

Regenerative Subsistence Fauna Food
#1

Here’s a link to a discussion at paleoplanet about subsistence hunting and laws in various places.

I have often thought about this in terms of people feeling like they need to be outside the law in order to be able to feed themselves by hunting.
I understand that people may have some kind of objections to paying for the licenses and having to comply with hunting only certain animals at certain times. I also understand that there may be bigger political implications of all that.
But it also seems that if a person really wanted to eat wild food, that they hunted and fished for, and also wanted to avoid the hassle of possibly getting arrested, it is possible to legally kill plenty of really good meat in most parts of the US and Canada. Especially if you have a freezer, but even if you use other storage methods.
For myself, I pretty much stay legal because getting caught is too much trouble. Occasionally I pick up roadkills if they are good but most of our red meat and fish is wild and taken by me, with a few birds in there too (wild turkey and grouse mostly). You don’t have to poach it or wait for the collapse of civilization.

#2

I disagree. Here in Alaska, if I were to kill a moose during the legally allotted time frame, the meat would all spoil. You pretty much have to live in town and have electricity and a freezer to follow their laws. Fish and game laws are pretty much disregarded by anyone who lives a subsistance lifestyle here - because what are they gonna do? Fly out here and psychically enforce their made up rules? They might hit each village once or twice a year, looking for obvious violations, but the bush pilots will mostly let you know they are coming. Actually, the law in general isn’t worth much here.

Not that I ever personally break any laws, ever. Cause that would be bad. And wrong. And stuff.

#3

And of course, as a law abiding citizen you would always report laws being broken.

The seasons here for some animals are highly restrictive. Some animals can only be hunted in April, for instance. Fishing season is a lot more open, luckily. It seems to me that subsistence hunting and fishing would require a ton of planning and scheduling here in Rhode Island.

Foraging is just insanely restricted here, at least in theory. It’s technically illegal to pick anything on public land. The law was supposedly designed to keep people from destroying ornate plantings near town buildings and in town centers and such. Luckily, I’ve never heard of anyone actually enforcing the law out in the woods.

#4

I was thinking more in terms of the lower 48 and Canada. If you look in the posts at the link I posted there are places in the S. states where a person can take an almost unlimited number of deer.
I don’t know much about the situation in Alaska. What you describe is pretty much how I imagined it in terms of remoteness and minimal enforcement.
For someone unfamiliar with actually going out and doing it, our hunting regs. would look pretty restrictive too. But the reality is a reasonably experienced hunter who puts in some time can eat almost entirely wild meat and quite a variety as well.
I also figured that not every one, but most of the folks on this forum at this time either have a freezer or access to one. When we get to a point where most of you don’t have electricity then the law probably won’t be of any consideration either.
I dried and canned lots of meat before I had electricity and also made it a point to kill a deer after the temps were good and cold.