Oregon’s Anti-Hunting Bill, IP 28, Failing But Not Dead!

Oregon’s Outlandish Anti-Hunting, Fishing, and Agriculture Petition Fails First Round Verification of Signatures 

And…we’re back discussing one of the wildest anti-hunting, fishing, trapping, agriculture, and overall, meat-eating bills in the United States. 

Initiative Petition 28 (better known by supporters as the PEACE Act) would remove exemptions from Oregon’s animal-cruelty laws that currently protect hunting, fishing, trapping, livestock slaughter and common animal-husbandry practices. The people behind it have been grinding away for a few years, trying to put their proposal in front of Oregon voters.

This time, they have come closer than ever to getting it on the ballot.

Supporters submitted 142,784 signatures before Oregon’s July deadline. Since IP 28 needs 117,173 valid signatures to qualify for the November ballot, the campaign appeared to have cleared the raw-signature requirement by quite a few names.

There was just one problem: Oregon doesn’t just automatically count every name written on a petition as a valid signature.

The Oregon Secretary of State’s office checks whether petition signers are registered Oregon voters, whether they signed more than once and whether the submitted signatures match voter records. In the first random sample of 1,000 IP 28 signatures, only 804 were accepted as valid.

That is an 80.4% validity rate. IP 28 needed a little more than 82% to qualify through the initial review and it missed.

That does not mean IP 28 has officially failed. Oregon will now conduct a larger second signature review before making a final determination. But if the first sample accurately represents the entire pile, IP 28 would finish with roughly 114,800 valid signatures, which is a couple thousand short of what it needs to get on the ballot.

What IP 28 Would Actually Do

It is worth briefly revisiting why hunters, anglers, ranchers and farmers have taken this petition so seriously.

IP 28’s supporters describe it as an effort to extend protections against animal cruelty to animals used in agriculture, research and the wild. The campaign itself openly says those changes would protect animals from “slaughter, hunting, fishing and experimentation.”

In practical terms, it would treat killing an elk, catching a trout or slaughtering a steer under many of the same animal-cruelty statutes intended to prosecute intentional abuse. It would also end livestock breeding, pest control and other ordinary agricultural practices as we know them.

This is not speculation coming exclusively from hunting organizations. Ending those practices is the stated objective on yesonip28.org

The campaign argues that Oregonians could meet their needs through plant agriculture, nonlethal wildlife management and non-animal research. In other words, the people behind IP 28 are not simply asking hunters to be more ethical or ranchers to improve livestock care. They are proposing a fundamentally different relationship between people and animals.

For perspective, national surveys generally find that somewhere around 5% of Americans identify as vegetarian. Those numbers are not specific enough to tell us exactly how many Oregonians are vegetarian, and signing IP 28 certainly does not prove someone intends to quit eating meat, but it shows the strange scale of this proposal. 

A relatively small portion of the population is attempting to use Oregon’s ballot system to impose its view of animals and food on everyone else, which includes hunters, anglers, ranchers, farmers and the overwhelming majority of households that eat meat.

Perhaps even more important is what David Michelson, IP 28’s primary architect, has written about the campaign. His arguments make it clear that qualifying one ballot initiative is not the only objective. The larger goal is to introduce the idea of animal “inviolable rights,” move the boundaries of the debate and make positions that sound extreme today seem more ordinary tomorrow.

IP 28 could fail this month and still accomplish part of that mission.

Hunters Shouldn’t Confuse a Close Call With a Victory

If the second signature review knocks IP 28 off the ballot, Oregon hunters and agricultural producers should take the win. Just don’t spike the football quite yet.

More than 140,000 signatures were submitted for a petition that openly seeks to eliminate hunting, fishing and animal agriculture as Oregonians currently know them. Some signers probably understood exactly what they were supporting. Others may have heard a friendly pitch about “ending animal cruelty” and signed without reading what was buried beneath the slogan.

Those are the people hunters need to think about this fall.

Most non-hunters are not campaigning to end hunting. Many simply have little connection to wildlife management or the process that puts food on a plate. What they know about hunters will often come from the hunters they meet, the stories they see online and how we behave when nobody thinks the broader public is watching.

That means making ethical shots, taking care of the meat, respecting landowners and explaining what hunting actually contributes to conservation. It means being able to talk about killing an animal honestly without sounding either ashamed of it or eager to turn the conversation into a political cage match.

We do not need every single voter to become a hunter. We need enough of them to understand that regulated hunting and intentional animal cruelty are not the same thing.

IP 28 failed its first test, but the people behind it are unlikely to disappear. Neither should our willingness to explain and defend what we do to those who are willing to listen.