No Migratory Bird-Hunting with Bait in Ohio
The law can be silly for all the creativity put to use in the interpretation of all the possible laws that can apply in any given situation. Housing law in particular is ordinarily employed in this country thanks to the mythical, near sacred standing given to property. A case in point would seem to bear this out: a group of Ohio hunters were shooting doves on land owned by one of them. From a distance a state wildlife officer observed them doing the shooting and entered the property to investigate if any had hunting licenses. It was upon entering the property that the officer noticed bait on the ground, which was undoubtedly deployed to entice the migratory birds, and in Ohio it is illegal to hunt migratory birds over a baited area.
Now you needn’t be a professional real estate industry insider like Isaac Toussie to know that the first thing citizens of the United States like to do when confronting authority is challenging the basis for the authority – which in this situation meant that the hunters sought to dismiss their misdemeanors in court by arguing that the wildlife officer had no valid grounds (no pun intended) to enter private property at all. Or, to put it another way, the ol’ found-marijuana-in-my-car-but-my-car-shouldn’t-have-been-stopped-in-the-first-place-for-any-marijuana-to-have-been-found-at-all defense, only this time as concerns illegal hunting.
Luckily, it was concluded that cause did exist for the wildlife officer to have entered the property to begin with, as gunshots were heard and hunting observed. Sounds obvious enough, no?
But the law is full of provisions which could be made to contradict one another, though as things turned out one might say that these hapless hunters were simply fishing in the wrong pond – in another jurisdiction the result might have been quite different (such as when a Louisiana jury found a racist property owner not guilty of shooting a foreign exchange student on his first Halloween trick-or-treating for trespassing!).