Legislators have given the coup de grace to one of the commonwealth’s remaining blue laws.
The General Assembly voted Monday to repeal the prohibition on Sunday hunting. While the commonwealth has long made allowances for coyote and fox hunts on Sundays and other exceptions, the new legislation authorizes the state Game Commission to designate additional Sundays free for hunting as it sees fit.
Northeast Pennsylvania hunters had mixed reactions to the repeal of the hunting blue law.
Daniel Kaczmarczyk, a 77-year-old U.S. Marine Corps veteran who served in Vietnam and has been hunting for 68 years, said the repeal would help those only free to hunt Sunday. Those with religious objections to hunting Sundays could simply choose to abstain themselves.
“If the people are that religious that they don’t want to go out and do something on Sunday…stay home, don’t go hunting that day,” Kaczmarczyk said outside J.S. Sporting Goods in Wilkes-Barre Twp. “But for the guys that can only make it out on a Sunday, what’s wrong with that?”
Daniel Kaczmarczyk (Chris Doyle/Staff Photographer)
Joe Lasecki Jr., the owner of Nimrod Haven Hunting & Fishing in Hanover Twp., had a muted response. While it may bring marginal benefits to hunters busy during the week, Lasecki said the bill would otherwise have little effect.
“I don’t foresee that getting any more people into the sport at this point,” Lasecki said. “If they need to buy some ammo (for Sundays) it’s not really a huge effect to us. It’s a box of shells.”
Mike Gritsko, a Philadelphia resident and retired Philadelphia police captain, said he opposed Sunday hunting and that hunting grounds needed time to recover from wear.
“You need a couple days for the woods to calm down, for people to calm down, for people to go cut wood, do things like that,” Gritsko said Tuesday at Nimrod Haven. “The animals need a day off too, I think, you know what I mean?”
The state House of Representatives passed the bill142-61 on Monday and the Senate passed it 34-16 on Thursday. It awaits Gov. Josh Shapiro’s signature.
The Game Commission noted that the bill enjoyed the support of the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, which in its own news release, praised the bill for “expanding opportunities for hunters while preserving important protections for landowners.”
Lasecki said he expected the bill’s impact to be tempered by individual landowners loath to allow Sunday hunting on their property, especially those from devout religious communities.
“They can get all the bureaus they want on board, but an individual person who says ‘no hunting on my property on Sunday’ is going to enforce that,” Lasecki said.
While the repeal of Pennsylvania’s hunting blue law is the bill’s headline, the legislation also stiffens penalties related to hunter trespassing and legalizes the use of natural deer urine in hunting.
Those who hunt on others’ private land without authorization may be required to forfeit their hunting privileges throughout the commonwealth for up to one year. When people have been personally warned by the landowner, trespassers will forfeit their hunting privileges for three years. The penalty for repeat offenses has been increased to a five-year forfeiture.
Robert Moore Jr., who was shopping at Nimrod Haven on Tuesday, said he was hopeful more severe penalties could have at least some deterrence effect — though he was skeptical of the Game Commission’s enforcement ability.
A 71-year-old man from Berwick who has been hunting for 59 years, Moore said he had a friend who owned land onto which hunters trespassed and could not get the Game Commission to respond to his complaints.
“They don’t want to play by the rules and regulations,” Moore said of trespassing hunters. “Somebody’s got to enforce it.”
“They don’t have the manpower,” Lasecki added.
Lasecki said if Harrisburg wanted to meaningfully help hunters it should address the two largest issues threatening the sport — ticks and chronic wasting disease, an illness that impacts deer. He said fear of ticks and CWD was increasingly discouraging hunting and accelerating the sport’s decline across generations. (The bill had included a provision that required the newly legalized deer urine be tested for CWD prions, but it was stricken before the final vote.)
“It’s not about creating more opportunity, there’s opportunity there for (hunters),” Lasecki said. “It’s (about) what’s developed to be problems — the CWD and the ticks.”