Only in Michigan can you buy weed on every street corner, marry whoever you want, and change your gender at will — but if you drop an apple on your own land, you’re suddenly an outlaw. That’s not freedom. That’s bureaucratic tyranny disguised as wildlife management.
The state baiting ban, in place since 2018, criminalizes basic property use under the illusion of “science.” Yet the very same government that bans your corn pile celebrates “standing corn” as perfectly legal — because apparently it’s only “disease-spreading” once it leaves the stalk. Colorado has had Chronic Wasting Disease since the 1960s, and their herds are thriving. The “science” isn’t science at all — it’s policy theater from a government that’s forgotten who owns the land.
The Constitutional Problem
The Fourth Amendment guarantees citizens the right to be secure in their “persons, houses, papers, and effects.” Your land is part of that security. When DNR officers enter private property without a warrant or consent — citing the archaic “open fields doctrine” — they violate that principle outright. That doctrine predates drones, night optics, and GPS surveillance; it’s a legal relic being weaponized against rural citizens.
The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments protect against government taking or depriving citizens of property without due process. Yet baiting bans turn lawful farming and hunting practices into crimes. If government can dictate how you use your soil, crops, and game — without compensation, consent, or evidence of harm — then property rights are fiction.
And under Equal Protection, the hypocrisy becomes blinding. The DNR allows giant unharvested food plots but fines the farmer who legally sells corn to feed deer. That’s not conservation — that’s selective persecution.
Who Suffers
Ninety percent of Michigan’s population lives within ninety miles of Lansing. It’s easy to write laws when you’ve never field-dressed a deer, tilled a plot, or prayed over an empty freezer. Rural families rely on baiting not just for tradition but for survival — filling the freezer and feeding the kids. What’s wrong with a farmer selling some surplus crops for Christmas cash? Now they’re fined for living how their fathers did, while state-hired sharpshooters in February “manage” deer by wounding them for coyotes, wolves, and cougars to finish off — the same predators the bureaucrats seem to love more than the taxpayers who fund them, and who’s Pittman-Robertsons $1B a year excise tax funds their boondoggles to Ireland for some superb Guinness.
The Real Question
If government can tell you what you can or can’t do on your own land — under your own stewardship, at no harm to others — then freedom is no longer a right. It’s a revocable license.
So no, Lansing, this isn’t about deer. It’s about control. And until the Constitution is respected from the city limits to the last cedar swamp, civil disobedience will remain not rebellion — but duty.
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