Lacey Act of 1900

So after day three, if you're successful, your next four days, you're hunting illegal unless you're getting rid of those birds because you can't fully process them.

Because if you drive back to Georgia without a wing on, now you're violating the Lacey Act.

Yeah.

But if you're there and you've got cleaned birds with wings on them in the freezer and you hunt day number four and shoot your limit on a legally bought license, on a legally hunt, everything legal.

Even people who have ordered venison, pheasant, quail, or duck from a restaurant menu haven't tasted the wild equivalent of what arrived on their plate.

Enacted in 1900, the Lacey Act stopped hunters from selling game meat to curtail rampant market hunting and stabilize plummeting game populations across the country.

Now, if a restaurant wants to serve game meat, it must purchase it from a game farm.

In other words, if you order quail at a restaurant, it grew up in a pen, not in a plum thicket.

Well, yeah, just to be clear, when we talk about that, go out of state, if you break a law out of state, bring that animal back, it is a felony.

That's a violation of our Lacey Act.

That's where it was at, you know.

So you can get in big trouble.

Then they would register or tag them in states where it's okay to hunt bobcats, making their illegal kills look legit.

And this appears to be a violation of a federal law called the Lacey Act.

It was written by a Republican congressman from Iowa, John Lacey, back in 1900, because at the time, we were raining hellfire on America's birds.

Commercial hunters were killing them by the millions to sell as food and to literally put a feather in women's caps.

While some states allowed this, others didn't.

So in order to get around these state laws, these commercial hunters would launder their birds, pretending that they killed them in states that allowed this kind of hunting, when in reality, they killed them in states that didn't.

The Lacey Act put an end to that.

So Ron called up his colleagues at the U.S.

Yeah.

And it's cool that the, the trade and the anger and the outrage, it involved creating these conservation societies that people could be more actively involved in, but it also created real legislation that, So there's the Lacey Act, the Weeks-McLean Act, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which we've referenced the Migratory Bird Treaty Act before.

It's why some birds that we've already talked about, it's illegal to hunt them and different things like that.

So these are real, real actions that were taken, not just clubs that were formed for like good times, but instead like actual conservation movements that that really created more environmental protection rather than environmental... objectification, I guess, like enjoying the environment for the, the vibes, the aesthetics, but instead enjoying the environment and protecting what we have and trying to conserve that.

And to some extent, this precedes the geopolitical competition dimensions.

It's simply the enormity of the appetite and willingness to accept commodities without, uh, proper, um, certified, uh, supply chains, um, without, um, at least the nominal demands that Western companies have to comply with, whether by laws such as the Lacey Act in the United States or, um, uh, because, uh, boards and shareholders in the West demand that.

So China has far-- Chinese companies operate under far less scrutiny with corruption, uh, practices being far more, uh, established and willingness to overlook the source of, uh, the commodity.

Now, there's no doubt that geopolitics are very significantly shaping organized crime, um, in wide variety of domain, including far greater willingness to, um, by states to use criminal groups to serve state purposes, and this is certainly true about, uh, China.

two misdemeanors.

One was for a Lacey Act violation.

which the people out here that doesn't know, Lasiak, by the way, take an illegal bird across the state line, or deer, whatever, which was made for elk and whatever to start with.

But they took what they said was that one illegal bird across the state line in Missouri, a mile and a half away, and that made a Lasiak violation, and an illegal sale of wildlife.

And so that's sort of where the concern comes in here.

And then the federal issue and the reason why they were charged federally is because any time that an animal is killed or hunted illegally and you transport that animal's carcass or anything from the animal out of state or across state lines, then it becomes a federal crime under what's called the Lacey Act.

So that is what they were charged with.

Gosh, but wrong is wrong.

So he spoke a little bit at the sentencing and he said that his recommendation was also probation.

He said that these folks had been law-abiding citizens their whole lives.

And I think that his hope was that this would kind of raise more awareness for people in that community and for other guides that perhaps know these folks that they have to comply with these regulations and that there are potentially bigger things at play than just the state permit, that there are federal violations and that it is these folks' responsibility to be aware of the Lacey Act and how their actions could potentially violate that.

Indeed, more awareness primarily through your reporting.