Missouri’s Supreme Court must decide whether the state’s Department of Conservation has the power to regulate deer held in captivity on hunting preserves, after hearing oral arguments Wednesday morning.
“We need to have this issue resolved before the next hunting season, although that’s in September, October (and) November,” former Chief Justice William Ray Price told the court, representing the department.
“This case is about the importation of trophy-antlered white-tail deer for destination hunts costing between $4,000-$40,000 per deer taken.”
Price said the court should be guided by the state Constitution’s 1936 language giving the department power “to regulate game and wildlife resources of the state” and by state laws first written in the 1940s that say the department’s authority includes animals that are “imported.”
Price said that word is important because “nothing would be imported absent ownership, possession or control by some other private entity.”
But attorney Jean Paul Bradshaw, representing landowner Donald Hill — who originally sued the department over its captive cervid regulations — asked the court to find that Conservation overstepped its authority with the regulations.
“We’re not talking about animals captured and converted to private use,” Bradshaw said. “These deer have been bred just like you would breed cattle, hogs (or) any other kind of animal.
“We wouldn’t allow the Department of Conservation to come into a turkey facility in Southwest Missouri or a hog farm in North Missouri and say, ‘We’re going to allow you to regulate these animals,’ because we recognize those (operations) are under the jurisdiction of the Missouri Department of Agriculture (and) the United States Department of Agriculture.”
He noted the department’s lawyers, including Price, emphasized the cost of the deer.
“I would suggest to you that’s irrelevant,” he said.
Price noted the Conservation Commission has regulated big-game hunting preserves since 1973 and allowed white-tail deer hunting since 1985, but it sought to ban importation of the deer from other states because of chronic wasting disease, which is a highly infectious and always fatal disease of the brain and spinal cord.
Price said the disease started in Colorado and has impacted herds in Colorado, Wyoming, Wisconsin and northern Illinois.
He acknowledged the hunting preserve owners like Hill “are good business people (who) run a national search” to find deer with the right kind of antlers a hunter might prefer for a trophy display.
With humans moving deer over much larger areas than their natural 25-mile radius, Price said the fear is CWD could be moved to places that don’t have it.
He said the first cases of CWD in Missouri were found at hunting preserves in Linn and Macon counties with the same owner, and the commission’s decision to block importing deer also should block the spread of the disease.
“The only way to control this disease is to keep it from being established,” he said.
But, Bradshaw countered: “Under the argument that the (department) is making, anything that constitutes a threat to the wellbeing of the wildlife of the state is in fact something they have regulatory power over because they say they have responsibility for their welfare. Taken to its logical conclusion, that presents no restriction on that power other than that which they choose to self-impose.”
Bradshaw said captive deer already are regulated, and landowners don’t disagree with the state and federal regulations they already face.
He said the existing regulations mean there’s more testing of captive deer than of wild ones — so it’s more likely to get positive test results on the hunting preserves.
“In Missouri you have to report every mortality of an imported deer — you have to report it and test it for CWD,” Bradshaw said. “I would suggest that 20,000 tests (of wild deer) over eight years is not very many when you look at the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of deer that are taken in Missouri every year.”
The existing laws, with captive herds regulated by the agriculture departments, make sense, Bradshaw said, but Conservation’s additional rules could force some landowners, like Hill, out of business.
Bradshaw argued the Constitution and statutory language Price cited actually restrict the department to state resources and don’t extend to private resources.
“And I would contend, up until this case, that’s the way (Conservation) always approached things,” he added.
Chief Justice Zel Fischer thanked both sides for a well argued case but didn’t predict when the court would issue a final ruling.