IP 28 is dead, but the pattern behind it – deciding complex wildlife policy at the ballot box – isn’t going away. That conversation is worth continuing. 

Initiative Petition 28 will not appear on Oregon’s November ballot. After proponents submitted 142,784 signatures on July 2, the Secretary of State’s Elections Division tested two random samples and found that neither cleared the roughly 82%  validity rate the petition needed. The measure is finished. 

The measure, formally called the People for the Elimination of Animal Cruelty Exemptions Act (PEACE ACT), would have removed longstanding exemptions from Oregon’s animal-cruelty laws. Activities that injured or killed an animal, including hunting, fishing, trapping, livestock slaughter, certain breeding practices, wildlife management, pest control, and some agricultural and scientific research, could have become criminal offenses.  

For Oregon’s hunters, anglers, trappers, farmers, ranchers, and everyone in the state that relies on protein from harvest of wild game or agricultural practices, this is a relief. In one form or another, this proposal has hung over our community for six years. Defending against it has consumed significant time, money, and attention that our community would have rather spent on habitat work, access, and the actual business of conserving fish and wildlife. But it would be dishonest to say we feel only relief. IP 28 would have forced a statewide conversation that Oregon has needed for a long time and because the ideas behind this measure are not going away on their own, let’s have that conversation anyway. 

Oregon’s foray into direct democracy dates to 1902, when the state adopted the initiative and referendum processes –  a reform so closely identified with this place that it became known nationally as the Oregon System. The initiative was designed as a corrective mechanism, giving citizens recourse when elected officials failed to act, not as a primary governance tool for complex regulatory systems like wildlife management.  

More than a century on, the record is mixed, and the tool that was meant for corrections has been used to increasingly in recent decades. Oregonians have use the initiative to do genuinely important things, but they have also been asked to decide questions that were poorly drafted, misleading in their titles, funded almost entirely from outside the state, used to take the temperature of voters on certain issues, or written by people with no working knowledge of what they proposed to regulate. In 1994, Measure 18 asked voters to prohibit the use of dogs to hunt cougars and bait to hunt bears. It passed. The vote removed a management tool used by the public through campaigning rather than being guided by the state’s wildlife management process. More than three decades later, Oregon’s wildlife professionals have had to manage cougar populations within this voter approved constraint.

Wildlife Management Must Remain Grounded in Science 

Measure 118 and IP 28 are not the same, but together they demonstrate the difficulty of deciding complex wildlife management questions through ballot box biology that offers voters a seemingly simple, yes- or- no, choice. Wildlife is held in trust for all Oregonians, so the public has an essential voice in setting conservation values and holding decision-makers accountable. But specific decisions about seasons, harvest methods, population objectives, and conflict management should be informed by evidence and carried out by qualified wildlife professionals through transparent public processes. The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation was built to provide the foundation for that approach. Its premises are simple and radical: wildlife is held in trust for everyone rather than owned by the wealthy, it is allocated by law rather than by markets, and it is managed according to the best available science. Those principles only hold if the science is allowed to do its work. 

What many Oregonians don’t know is who has been paying for the wildlife and wild places they love, and who has been doing the work: Hunters and anglers built the system that conserves Oregon’s wildlife, and then taxed themselves to fund it. License and tag sales, together with federal excise taxes paid on firearms, ammunition, and fishing tackle under the Pittman-Robertson and Dingell-Johnson Acts, return millions of dollars to Oregon every year. That money pays for habitat restoration, population research, enforcement, and public access. It funds work on songbirds and salamanders as surely as on elk and steelhead. It is, as far as we know, the only conservation model in the world in which the users of a resource asked to be regulated and then volunteered to pay for the careful management of those resources. That is a remarkable thing, and not enough outside our community know the story. 

Neither do most Oregonians know the depth of how this measure would have reached into every day life. The traditions IP 28 treated as cruelty are, in practice, some of the oldest and most careful food cultures known:  the family that fills their freezer with carefully wrapped packages of venison each fall, the crabber and the clam digger on the coast, the rancher and the chef sourcing from within a 100 miles. Hunting, fishing, and agriculture are among the oldest human traditions on this landscape, sustaining communities here for thousands of years before statehood. This is not to say these activities should be beyond scrutiny: Hunters, anglers, farmers, ranchers, and wildlife managers all have a responsibility to uphold high standards of animal care, fair chase, ethical harvest, and responsible stewardship. 

The more Oregonians who understand where conservation funding actually comes from, the better equipped the state is to weigh proposals like this on their merits.  As responsible hunters and anglers, we should talk with our neighbors, legislators, and other Oregonians about why we care. Every conversation that connects a wildlife refuge, a healthy salmon run, or a herd of elk in the Blue Mountains back to the people who paid for it broadens our tent. The North American Model has lasted more than a century because generations of hunters and anglers kept faith with it. It will last another century only if the public that owns this wildlife understands what it owns, and who has been tending it. 

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