For two weeks each November, Jeff Davis is in heaven. That’s when the state of Indiana allows him to indulge his passion of hunting deer with firearms.
“I love it, I can’t wait for it,” said the 52-year-old Osceola man. “When gun season opens I try to get out there every day. I take time off work. It’s just you out there with nature.”
Under a bill passed recently by the Indiana General Assembly, Davis could shoot deer from September through February if he wanted to pay the owners of fenced-in preserves thousands of dollars. He doesn’t have that kind of money, but even if he did, he said he wouldn’t be interested.
“There’s a lot of things I disagree with about it,” Davis said of the practice critics deride as “canned hunting.” “It’s not really giving fair chase for the animal, and they’re accustomed to being fed all the time.”
Davis hopes Gov. Mike Pence will veto the bill, and he’s not alone. The Hoosier Environmental Council, the Indiana Wildlife Federation, the Indiana Deer Hunters Association and the Humane Society of the United States are among the groups who’ve fought the bill. They oppose it on two fronts: They feel it’s unethical to hunt farm-raised animals that can’t flee because of 8-foot fences, and they say confining deer on farms and in preserves, and transporting them across state lines can spread deadly diseases, such as chronic wasting disease, to wild deer.
There are believed to be at least seven such preserves in Indiana, and they’ve been operating for years. But their legal status has been in limbo for the past decade, since the Indiana Department of Natural Resources in 2005 ordered their closure. That order was stayed when the roughly dozen hunting preserves operating at that time sued the DNR, arguing that the state agency had no statutory authority over privately owned animals.
The case took a decade to wind through the courts, until February 2015 when the Indiana Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 in favor of the preserves.