By Terry Witt – Spotlight Senior Reporter
In Goethe State Forest this fall and in the past several years, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission continued to play its dangerous game of allowing horse riders to use the same roads as deer hunters armed with high-powered deer rifles during deer hunting season.
It’s quite a contrast. The deer hunters are dressed in flame orange clothing as required by state law and the horse riders are dressed in clothing that often doesn’t distinguish them from the landscape at a distance. Sometimes the horse riders disappear into the woods and are invisible to the hunters.
Hunters are worried that a stray bullet fired at deer could accidentally hit one of the horse riders and cause a tragedy of unprecedented proportions, but they say FWC is more interested in harassing the deer hunters than in working to resolve safety issues before the unthinkable happens.
What’s more, dog hunters say they are being harassed and ticketed with $50 fines by game wardens from FWC for driving their pickup trucks on unmarked roads that wardens claim are off limits to hunters. Hunters say in most cases they are trying to capture their dogs before they reach private property and they get hit with a fine of $300.
Goethe State Forest is a 54,000-acre recreational area used by hunters, horse riders, bird watchers, hikers, and nature enthusiasts, but during hunting season, the hunters say everyone should be wearing flame orange attire above the waist to prevent an accidental shooting.
FWC has been largely silent on the issue of hunter harassment in Goethe State Forest and it’s not just hunters that have hit a proverbial stone wall when trying to get information from FWC about the safety and harassment issues. The agency promised an investigation in 2021 when hunters alleged extreme harassment in the forest by game wardens. The hunt occurs at about the same time every year in late November and lasts 11 days.
When Spotlight sent a public records request to FWC asking to be given the final report on the investigation into alleged harassment by game wardens in 2021, the response was evasive. A person named Ariana, apparently in the FWC public information office, wrote back saying in an email to Spotlight, “Clarification is needed to fulfill your request for a final report. Do you happen to have a case number, subject name, or complainant?”
Ariana ignored the fact that an investigation allegedly took place in 2021 concerning allegations of game warden harassment of hunters during the annual 11-day deer hunt in Goethe. She acted as though Spotlight was requesting someone’s complaint filed by a hunter or that somehow Spotlight would have knowledge of a case number on the final report, if there is such a report. Spotlight replied that Ariana’s response was evasive and that a complaint would be filed with the Attorney General alleging a violation of the state’s public records law by FWC. Any criminal investigation that has been closed, if it actually existed in the first place, should be a public record. But many times law enforcement agencies, including FWC, pretend they don’t know what the reporter is talking about in the public records request or they say the investigation remains open and they aren’t obligated to respond, or they release a report so heavily redacted that it’s nothing but black ink separated by a word or two. In the case of Ariana (no last name), it was a blend of the first two. She hasn’t gotten to the point of providing a heavily redacted final report on what really happened in Goethe last year regarding the harassment of hunters.
A written complaint will be filed by Spotlight with the Attorney General on Monday, as if that would actually be taken seriously. It won’t be taken seriously, but it will be filed anyway. As the Goethe hunters have already realized, and communicated to Spotlight, they know they live in an era of big government agencies in Tallahassee that can make up the rules as they go and the common man, the little man, the hunters in this case, feel they have little recourse to get equal treatment under the law.
They believe the horse riders, who are beginning to dominate the landscape in Goethe, physically, and politically as their numbers increase, are getting favorable treatment. Hunters say they have nothing against the riders and they say most of them are friendly toward hunters and aren’t troublemakers, though not all of them. Some glare and scowl at hunters. The same is basically true of hunters. Nearly all of them have invested considerable money just for the privilege of hunting in Goethe. They are law-abiding citizens and most are Levy County residents. They aren’t looking for trouble but trouble finds them around every corner as game wardens constantly pull them over to look through the equipment or to write citations for driving on the wrong unmarked dirt road.
Meeks: Primary Concern Safety
County Commission Chairman Rock Meeks, who is a still hunter, meaning he sometimes hunts from a stationary stand, as well as a dog hunter, said his primary concern at Goethe is the lack of safety precautions by FWC in allowing horse riders to move freely through areas where hunters are trying to hunt deer during the hunting season. He said it’s an unsafe mix of non-hunters and hunters that could ultimately end in an accidental shooting that state officials should have seen coming years ago.
Meeks said it would help a great deal if horse riders were held to the same standard as hunters and required to wear 500 square inches of fluorescent flame orange material above the waist when they ride during the 11-day deer hunting season to give hunters a better chance to see them before they pull the trigger, but he said FWC wasn’t receptive to his safety suggestion when he talked to the officer who is the head of law enforcement at the state agency.
“I made that point to FWC. I said I’m not trying to hold these people riding a horse to a standard different than what is required of hunters, but the horse riders are not wearing blaze orange and I am standing there with a 300 Winchester short magnum (deer rifle). My dogs are ahead. I don’t know if there is a person (a horse rider) out there I can’t see,” Meeks said. “It’s not if something ever happens, it’s when it happens. Nobody wants to live with something like that. I sure don’t. It’s not a jab at the horse community at all. It’s a safety concern,” Meeks said.
Meeks said he hopes to work with the Florida Division of Forestry, which manages Goethe, and the forestry division’s big boss, recently elected Florida Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson, to find out if something can be done to require horse riders and other recreationalists in Goethe to wear fluorescent blaze orange upper clothing during the 11-day deer hunting season to ensure a tragedy doesn’t happen in the form of an accidental shooting.
Meeks is also concerned about a second issue, an important one, but not as important as safety, regarding hunters being harassed by game wardens who sometimes pull them over several times in a day to make equipment checks and essentially ruin their day and prevent the deer hunters from killing a deer because they are constantly having to pull out all their equipment for inspection. He said they are also being ticketed for allegedly driving on unmarked roads the wardens say are off limits to hunters, but there are no signs on the roads to warn hunters.
He said he is interested in fairness and equality. He doesn’t want to rob the horse riders of their ability to ride in Goethe.
“We all utilize the same ground. Everybody’s there to enjoy it. Everybody’s there to have a good time. Everybody needs to be the same for safety,” he said.
He described the practice of game wardens giving dog hunters tickets when they wind up on an unmarked road catching their dogs as “distasteful.”
“The roads are not marked. It’s distasteful is what it is. To me, the road citations are not as much of a safety issue as it is with the horse riders not wearing orange. Safety is the important thing that needs to be addressed by FWC immediately, but they don’t seem to want to do that,” Meeks said. He said still hunters face the same safety issue as dog hunters. “If you are still hunting, and there are hunters who go and sit in a tree stand or they sit on the ground – just hunters, in general, have to wear orange if they have a gun in their hand. I want to get that out there because it’s not just dog hunters, it’s the hunting community as a whole.”
Meeks used an example of a still hunter seated on the ground and looking down a dirt road in Goethe and not being able to see horse riders coming toward him because they are dressed in street clothes rather than wearing blaze orange clothing above the waist.
“It’s not just a dog hunters’ issue. It’s a hunting issue across the board. It’s just hunting as a whole whether it’s during a dog hunt, where it’s during a still hunt, or in turkey season, it’s just unsafe. That is the number one concern I have and they don’t seem to want to do anything about it,” he said.
He said one man contacted him to ask why he had concerns about what FWC does in Goethe. Meeks said as far as he knows, all five county commissioners received calls from constituents concerned about the behavior of game wardens in Goethe.
“My reply back to his question – a good majority of the people who are using Goethe for dog hunting and still hunting are citizens of Levy County who are being harassed by FWC. I think every commissioner got a phone call last year about that issue, about all the tickets that were issued. When a citizen calls, we’re going to respond to it. To me, I feel it’s harassment. If you look at the FWC report for the past five years, most of the tickets are given when the quota hunt permits are issued and the hunting season starts,” Meeks said. He said the report he received contained numbers and dates but there was no written explanation explaining the behavior of the game wardens, but said the numbers showed the vast majority of tickets are given at Goethe during hunting season.
Meeks said he and his kids deer hunted in Goethe for two hours one Sunday this year, but only because his kids, who are lifetime hunters themselves, asked him to take them hunting after church. He said he hesitated when he thought of the possibility of being harassed by game wardens, but they went down to Goethe for two hours, chased one deer with the dogs, and left.
Harassment of Hunters Worsening
Hunter Hugh Lawrence agreed that harassment of hunters by game wardens continues to worsen every year.
“The main issue now is that their presence (game wardens) has become bigger and bigger. It’s just stomping on us is what it feels like,” Lawrence said. “It seems like it’s really horrible. It’s not right. We pay a lot of money. We only use Goethe for 11 days and they won’t give us those 11 days.”
He said he exchanged words with one game warden recently that he’s known all his life. The game warden told him that the Division of Forestry is blaming hunters for tearing up the roads in Goethe, an allegation that rankled Lawrence because he said it’s not true. The game warden said because their agency budget is eroding, they can’t allow the roads to get torn up by hunters.
Lawrence said that while the allegation isn’t true, if the Division of Forestry wants to assess a fee of $100 or $200 for road maintenance, they wouldn’t mind paying it. But he said the state doesn’t want to work with hunters to fix problems, they want to make excuses for why they issue so many citations to the powerless hunters.
Lawrence said he wasn’t present at Goethe for the first weekend of the 11-day season this year, but he heard a lot of hunters say the game wardens were writing a lot of tickets for driving on unmarked roads that game wardens said were off-limits to hunters.
“They were doing the same thing they did last year,” he said.
Lawrence has talked to Meeks and agrees that safety is a big issue and he likes the approach Meeks has proposed to get in touch with Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson to find out if the state will work with hunters and straighten out the safety issues and the game warden harassment of hunters.
“Last year I had three different game wardens check me within 30 minutes,” Lawrence said. “Our dogs had just started chasing something. They wanted us to pull out all of our stuff and show them. By then the deer had turned around or whatever. I said you all don’t communicate any better than this, when a person is checked three times in 30 minutes, — and that didn’t happen to just me, it happened to several people. You can’t just hunt. They check you all day long. It’s just not fair,” Lawrence said.
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Enterprise Reporting December 9, 2022; Posted December 9, 2022
