Lawmakers might successfully create a hunting dog permit this year through amendments to the state budget.
Budget amendments have been submitted in the House and Senate, which mandate the Department of Wildlife Resources to create a permit system by Oct. 31. Lawmakers have tried unsuccessfully through past legislation to help prevent hunting dogs on private property.
The permit would be required for any person who uses dogs to hunt or chase any game, including rabbit, deer and bear. The budget amendments state DWR shall have “minimally restricted” permit requirements and the permit be designed to “foster an atmosphere of voluntary compliance.”
The budget amendments state the permit will be free. Sen. David Marsden, D-Fairfax, who submitted the Senate request, said the cost could be on par with other hunting license fees at $18.
“It will be used to acquire additional enforcement staff to ensure that this bill is respected, and that people are following the dictates of the law,” Marsden said.
DWR is involved with the effort to balance the state’s long history of dog hunting with the rights of property owners. In recent years, the conflict between hunters and landowners has increased. The state agency recruited the University of Virginia’s Institute for Engagement and Negotiation last year to gather data from citizens and create a report.
There was mutual agreement that more law enforcement staff was needed, better communication between the two groups and “hound identification mechanisms could be improved,” according to the report. Landowners also supported revisions to the state’s “right to retrieve” law and better protection of landowners’ rights. DWR has a final report expected this spring.
The Hound Hunters and Private Landowners Stakeholder Advisory Committee was created by DWR last fall.
Jim Medeiros, dairy farmer and member of the Property Rights Coalition of Virginia, served on the advisory committee. He has experienced hound dogs entering his property and disturbing cattle and poultry. This has financially impacted his farm, he said. Medeiros was part of a lawsuit filed in 2022 over the “right to retrieve” hunting law.
“One of the things that came to light was that DWR requires legislative authority in order to create … reasonable regulations that could be brought into effect to curtail in the bad apples and integrate a system of accountability where these conflicts can be reduced,” Medeiros said.
He thinks the permit would create accountability, and works in other states.
“I’m not anti-dog hunting,” Medeiros said. “I just wish for those who want to participate in the sport to do so where they have permission to do so and not where they don’t have permission.”
Medeiros spoke on Tuesday in support of Marsden’s Senate Bill 712, a measure to keep hunters from releasing dogs within 15 feet of the edge of a state or local roadway. The bill carries a misdemeanor charge, with an increasing penalty for subsequent violations.
Hunters release the dogs as a loophole called “through hunting,” according to Medeiros.
“What they’re doing is they’re allowing their hounds to run through a piece of property where they don’t have permission to hunt, knowing that the hounds will chase the game off of that property onto a place where they have permission or adjoining property,” Medeiros said.
The Senate bill narrowly passed the Senate Agriculture Conservation and Natural Resources Committee on an 8-7 vote.
Robbie Shackelford, a hunter with the Newtown Sportsmen Association, has hunted for over 45 years. He thinks the conflict between property owners and hunters who use dogs is low, with just a few exceptions.
There are approximately 180,000 hound hunters in Virginia, according to 2022 statistics that Shackelford got at a Virginia Hunting Dog Alliance lobby day. The statistics are attributed to DWR data. The agency confirmed it did not create the fact sheet being circulated, but was not able to confirm the cited stats before this article’s publication.
The stats were used to make the case that roughly 7% of over 5,200 hunting complaints in 2022 involved dog hunting.
“It’s being painted completely different than what the numbers say,” Shackelford said.
The lawmakers have used the budget to establish a permit, which means there will not be the same public hearing that a bill would have.
“The art of politics is proven here where somebody’s kind of shoving something into a place where it doesn’t need to be,” Shackelford said.
Shackelford is unhappy about getting an additional license. He worries about potential citations from his dog running onto someone’s property, and about those citations adding up — or possibly losing his license.
“In my opinion, there are a lot of extremists out here that are against hound hunting,” Shackelford said.
He also does not think a state representative from an urban area such as Fairfax should pose a bill that affects rural residents.
The permit cost will not be “prohibitive of the sport that they love,” Marsden said. It’s also a “changing world” without big tracts of undeveloped land, he said.
“Hopefully this is a message to people about how you treat your neighbors,” Marsden said.
Del. Paul Krizek, D-Fairfax, who submitted the House budget amendment, did not return email and telephone requests.
Capital News Service is a program of Virginia Commonwealth University’s Robertson School of Media and Culture. Students in the program provide state government coverage for a variety of media outlets in Virginia.
