Just as Oregon wildlife managers in 2002 were about to ban the increasingly popular electronic duck decoy dubbed “robo-duck,” Ron Anglin watched a television show in which holograms of people were projected into the air.
Anglin’s Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife was five years late in banning the swimming and diving robo-ducks as a technological threat to hunting’s fair-chase ethic here, and he didn’t want a repeat of that mistake. So he added holograms to the list of big-game and game-bird decoy technologies banned in Oregon — even though hologram decoys did not exist at that time.
“I thought, if they’re already doing this, it’s a matter of time before they start doing this for ducks,” says Anglin, ODFW’s Wildlife Division administrator.
The latest technological advance ODFW wants to halt before it soils the principles of outdoors fair-chase involves drones, and the agency opened its case against the use of drones for hunting and fishing this week in the Oregon Legislature.
House Bill 2534 would ban drones for hunting or fishing, as well as for harassing or tracking any fish or wildlife in the state. Moreover, the bill would ban the use of drones for interfering with lawful fishing and hunting activities.
Oregon State Police Fish and Wildlife Division officials say they have not yet encountered drone use by hunters or anglers. Anglin says this bill would ensure that here.
“It’s amazing how technology is changing and what they can put out there for hunters to use,” Anglin says. “We’ve got to get out ahead of it before it happens.
“I’d be surprised if this didn’t pass,” Anglin says. “It’s something many people can get behind.”
The man behind HB 2534 is Rep. Brad Witt, a Clatskanie Democrat who is the bill’s chief sponsor.
Witt was exposed to the possibilities of drones, known in the vernacular as “unmanned aerial vehicles,” while working with the Vernonia school system’s high school robotics program and Portland Community College on a curriculum involving UAVs.
“You see all the possibilities UAVs have, both good and bad,” says Witt, an avid bird hunter who also hunts big game. “It’s not too much of a stretch to see people become creative and expand that technology to hunting and fishing. That’s certainly a stretch we don’t want to see happening, in Oregon or elsewhere.”
HB 2534 has been assigned to the House Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee, a panel full of hunters and anglers that is chaired by Witt.
Keeping hunters from using advances in technology to boost their chances goes back decades with the ban on using aircraft to spot big-game animals. In Oregon, it has long been illegal to hunt big-game until at least eight hours after communicating or receiving information from an aircraft.
Two years ago, ODFW added language that specifically mentions drones in that eight-hour window.
The current bill jumps far past the eight-hour window for an all-out ban not only on spying on animals’ whereabouts from the air but also spooking or herding them with drones and from harassing hunters and anglers with them.
Oregon traditionally has been on the front-end of fair-chase issues. Many Oregonians — including Medford’s Don Denman, a fish and wildlife commissioner who had earlier been given a robo-duck as a gift but voted for the ban — had to throw their robo-ducks away in 2002.
Perhaps later this year Oregonians will be banned from using drones to scout elk or check out a fishing hole, just like they haven’t been allowed to use such things as electronic doe decoys or large, gyrating wild turkeys that “strut” up and down a field on what amounts to electric railroad tracks.
“Things like that really weren’t on the market yet when we banned them along with robo-ducks,” Anglin says. ”They are now.”
