In 2004, Michigan hunters did something rare: we trusted the system. Voters amended the Michigan Constitution to explicitly protect hunting and fishing as a constitutional right and a valued heritage. That amendment wasn’t symbolic. It was a promise. A promise that hunting would not be slowly regulated into irrelevance by unelected agencies, political fear, or bureaucratic drift. It said, plainly, that hunting mattered—and that the people who practice it would not be treated like a problem to be managed.
Four years later, in 2008, that trust was broken.
The state invoked Chronic Wasting Disease as an emergency justification to ban deer baiting across large portions of Michigan. Emergency powers were activated. Hunters were told this was temporary, necessary, and rooted in science. We complied. We adjusted. We did what conservation-minded hunters have always done—we acted in good faith. Emergency measures are supposed to end when the emergency ends.
But here we are, nearly two decades later.
CWD did not disappear—but neither did it explode in the way we were warned it would. Deer still congregate in winter yards, standing corn, food plots, orchards, and agricultural fields. Yet somehow, a pile of apples on private land became the unforgivable sin. The “science” never followed the policy—only the control did.
And then the mask slipped.
Michigan now wants to sell you permission to do what was once legal, normal, and constitutionally protected—by floating the idea of a baiting license. Read that again. If baiting was truly an existential disease threat, no license would make it safe. You don’t license an emergency. You end it—or you admit it’s no longer an emergency.
This isn’t about CWD anymore. It hasn’t been for a long time.
This is about control, revenue, and a system that discovered it could take something away and then sell it back to you.
That is not conservation. That is mismanagement dressed up as concern.
I am not a casual hunter. I’m a landowner. I hunt a fifth-generation family farm. My family stewarded this land long before the DNR existed in its current form. We planted trees, rotated crops, managed habitat, and harvested responsibly—without needing Lansing to micromanage every acorn that hits the ground. I grew up believing that private property meant something. That ownership came with responsibility, but also with freedom.
In 2004, Michigan told me that belief was still valid.
In 2008, they quietly walked it back.
And here’s the truth too many agencies don’t want spoken out loud: governments rarely relinquish emergency powers once they discover how useful they are. History is full of “temporary” controls that became permanent habits. Once authority expands, it almost never shrinks on its own. It has to be forced back—by citizens who remember what was promised.
Hunters were promised respect. We were promised constitutional protection. Instead, we got a regulatory maze where normal behavior is criminalized, enforcement is arbitrary, and tradition is treated as a threat. The same system that sells hunting licenses now treats hunters like suspects. The same agency that depends on hunter dollars increasingly acts as if it knows better than the people who live on and manage the land year-round.
This isn’t about wanting no rules. It’s about wanting honest ones.
If baiting is dangerous, prove it—consistently, transparently, and with current data. If it’s not, stop pretending fear justifies permanent control. And if the answer is a license, then admit what this really is: a revenue stream built on a power grab that never expired.
Michigan hunters kept their word in 2004.
The state did not keep theirs in 2008.
It’s time to call that what it is—and demand the trust be restored.
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I’ve had my own run-ins with the Michigan Department of natural resources ( DNR), and I can tell you that based on my experiences, it’s nothing more than a giant revenue generation machine for the state. It has nothing to do with managing healthy wildlife populations, safeguarding the public, or conserving natural resources.