Mississippi Fair Chase Act

a clear move in the wrong direction

Photo by Danny Kroon on Unsplash

HB828: This bill creates the Mississippi Fair Chase Act, making it unlawful to kill or trap game or furbearing animals damaging crops or property without a state depredation permit and sharply restricting hunting with dogs to very large private tracts.

Full Analysis

Vote Statement

A vote for this bill is a vote to centralize control over landowners’ ability to protect their own property from wildlife damage and to impose heavy new restrictions on hunting with dogs.

Key Provisions & Tradeoffs

• Requires a depredation permit plus a valid hunting license to hunt, trap, or take game or furbearing animals that are damaging crops or personal property.

• Empowers the Commission on Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks to set detailed rules and restricts allowed and prohibited methods of controlling nuisance wildlife.

• Limits hunting with dogs to private properties of at least 2,000 contiguous acres, regardless of how many owners are involved.

Liberty Analysis

From a limited-government and property-rights perspective, this bill is a clear move in the wrong direction. Current Mississippi law (49-7-31.5) already gives the Commission authority to regulate nuisance animals, and it explicitly allows landowners and agricultural leaseholders broad ability to take predatory and nuisance animals on their own lands, with resident landowners not needing a license to hunt or trap nuisance animals on their own property. HB828 cuts across that framework by creating a new depredation-permit requirement for taking game or furbearing animals that are damaging crops or personal property, and by tying that to a valid hunting license. That shifts decision-making power from the landowner, who directly bears the loss, to a commission that must approve and can condition the response. In effect, it converts what should be a core incident of private property—defending one’s crops and property from animal damage—into a licensed, pre-approved government activity.

Economically, this is presumptively harmful: wildlife damage imposes real costs on farmers and landowners. Adding permit processes, eligibility exclusions, and method restrictions delays mitigation, raises compliance burden, and can increase crop and property losses. There is no offsetting tax or spending reduction here—only more regulation and more departmental workload. The bill also bans several effective control tools (suppressors, thermal and night-vision scopes) except where the commission may selectively approve firearms use, increasing both risk and cost for landowners and reducing flexibility to handle problems safely and efficiently.

The 2,000-contiguous-acre requirement for hunting with dogs is a particularly intrusive regulation. It effectively prohibits dog hunting on most small and mid-sized properties, favoring very large landholdings and potentially enhancing the position of large landowners or clubs over ordinary citizens. This looks like a classic market distortion and property-rights restriction: it does not protect property owners from trespass (which is already illegal), but instead tells consenting landowners under 2,000 acres that they cannot use dogs even on their own land. That is a significant liberty and cultural restriction with no clear, narrowly tailored justification presented in the text.

Viewed through a sound-money and limited-government lens, this bill grows regulatory authority and enforcement complexity without any fiscal or deregulatory upside. It adds no new taxes or obvious large spending line, but it clearly expands the supervisory role of the Commission on Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks, increases permitting infrastructure and compliance demands, and narrows traditional common-law self-help rights in favor of administrative control. That direction is inconsistent with constitutional decentralization, voluntary exchange, and robust private property rights, making the overall package something that should be opposed.