Originally Posted by AU338MAG
Should have been fined at least five times that much.

The fines for major game violations are laughable and do nothing to deter these scumbags.

I remember sitting in the old Wishbone restaurant off 59 near Eutaw around 35 years ago. Some scumbag at a nearby table was bragging to his buddy about getting busted for shooting the mechanical deer on more than one occasion. He was laughing about it and saying that it wouldn't stop him.

Big fines
Jail time for repeat or egregious offenders
Confiscate trucks, guns etc used in commission of the crimes.

That's how to protect the resources.

Assholes like this guy do more harm than 10 guys in a hunting club with corn piles and cameras.

It made me chuckle coming from one thread where a guy got fined $25k for not leashing his dog, then coming to another thread where a guy got fined $5k and someone says at least 5 times that. And that was the argument I made the other day, so many people somehow have so much money that fines often just aren’t enough to deter people anymore.

I agree with you though. That’s not “my family was hungry and I took one” that’s just straight up flagrant poaching. You’d probably get $1000 fine just for being caught without the corn add-on for 2 kernels of old August corn sitting under a leaf. $5k isn’t really enough.


That being said the guy is going back to jail for other reasons and probably for a long time, so they probably figure they are never ever getting any more money than what they recover auctioning his seized stuff.


On the topic of over the limit vs night though.. while I would never state it as a “fact”, because I don’t have the numbers.. it’s plausible.
Before the last few years of game check at least, I’m pretty sure a lot of the guys in my club carried a harvest record, killed a buck, wrote it down, took the deer home/to processor then promptly threw that piece of paper away and printed a new blank one. You had 24 hours to report it after all. If you were inspected, you had all you needed to be “legit”, if you weren’t inspected you were scot-free.

It always irked me because the club had a strict 2 doe limit and would fine you quick if you killed a third one, or an undersized deer, but no one cared at all if you killed 6 bucks.