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Oregon is facing a full-frontal attack on its outdoor traditions as activists behind Initiative Petition 28 — the so-called PEACE Act — push to strip legal protections that have long allowed hunting, fishing and livestock farming to coexist with conservation. This is not a narrow reform; it is a sweeping attempt to criminalize time-honored practices that sustain rural economies and feed families, and it deserves the outrage it is getting from sportsmen and local leaders.
The language of IP28 would remove statutory exemptions that currently protect lawful hunting, fishing, trapping, farming and research from animal-cruelty laws, a move critics warn could turn ordinary Oregonians into criminals overnight. Rural communities, tribal members, and generations of sportsmen who manage wildlife through responsible harvest are being painted as villains by urban animal-rights activists unfamiliar with land stewardship.
Signature gatherers have already pushed the measure close to the ballot, with state filings showing petitioners collected more than the threshold needed to move forward and the secretary of state logging over 120,000 signatures. If this radical measure reaches voters in November, it will ignite a fight between coastal elites and the hardworking outdoorsmen who are the backbone of Oregon’s conservation and rural economy.
Beyond ideology, IP28 would wreak practical havoc: hunting and fishing license revenue, plus federal excise taxes on sporting goods, fund the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and numerous habitat projects that keep populations healthy. Strip those revenue streams and you don’t get better conservation — you get underfunded wildlife programs, fewer rangers, and less science-based management.
Fox News’ Joey Jones and other conservative voices are right to call out this measure as an assault on common sense and on the people who actually do the work of wildlife stewardship. When media and activists cheer policies that punish the very citizens who pay for conservation, they betray both biology and justice, and patriotic Americans should be incensed.
This is also a cultural battle over who gets to decide how Americans live and eat: urban bureaucrats and radical NGOs versus ranchers, anglers, hunters, and Indigenous communities with ancestral ties to the land. The push to outlaw hunting and fishing would trample treaty rights, traditional subsistence practices, and the rural way of life that sustains so much of Oregon’s character.
Conservatives and grassroots outdoorsmen must mobilize now — contact your county officials, support candidate pledges to protect hunting and fishing, and turn out to vote against any measure that would criminalize stewardship. This fight is about more than recreation; it’s about defending liberty, property rights, local control, and the common-sense conservation that Americans built long before coastal activists tried to rewrite the rules.
