It's hunting season. I don't do that anymore, because I enjoy access to food, and I don't find it sporting to destroy nature on a full stomach. Even so, every morning well before light, my eyes snap open and my brain is activated. This time of year, I still feel like I belong in the woods.
I have a small game license if I need it. I stay up on the regulations so I can freely exercise that privilege. And one has to pay careful attention because they change quite frequently. For instance, you can hunt deer over a limited quantity of certain types of bait in the Upper Peninsula this year, but not in the Lower Peninsula.
If you get confused about that, you might well run afoul of Michigan's Department of Natural Resources, as represented on the ground by their Conservation Officers. These men and women are the most highly trained law enforcement agents in the state of Michigan. They have nearly unlimited power to arrest people or to confiscate their property.
You can bet that if a DNR officer submits a complaint to your County prosecutor against you that the case will be taken up, and that you will shell out thousands of dollars if you've done something wrong, like killing a deer without a license. In short, they can mess your life up.
They can save your life, too. Whenever a motorboat dies out on the water, or whenever an ATV rider hits a tree, or whenever an unlucky angler falls through the ice, or whenever a little kid gets lost in the woods, there is almost always a CO involved in rescuing that person.
When the state of Michigan decided it could not trust Enbridge Energy to tell the truth about the condition of an antique oil pipeline running through the Straits of Mackinac in the Great Lakes, they sent their own dive team, consisting of DNR officers, to the bottom of the lake to get footage. Once they saw it, they ordered the pipeline shut down. Not many other states have the ability to do that.
However...
Law enforcement should also exist to protect people in the same way that they protect fish and ducks around here. And in the tragic case of my sister's son, that has not been our experience. She has been damaged by this. Literally.
I have made no secret of the fact that the two plaintiffs who are suing her both committed perjury during deposition testimony. Nobody cares. But they care about this:
(Courtesy of Michigan Outdoor News.)
In other words Kalamazoo County will be prosecuting the Infamous 2020 Daddy-Daughter Spring Turkey Conspiracy, wholeheartedly, just in time for Thanksgiving. But if you are a certain funeral home owner and her certain ex-con employee, you can push a court case against my sister for FOUR YEARS before even getting a trial date from a Circuit Court judge who has powdered the plaintiff's backside through the whole sickening ordeal.
That happens to be same judge who dismissed my sister's timely Appeal to have her son's Death Certificate corrected to reflect what the mendacious Medical Examiner admits to be factual... And that happens to be the same mendacious Medical Examiner whose department faxed a rather key document to Martha Redmond, who later lied under oath about having received it.
It's enough to drive a person to shoot Wild Turkey.
pH 11.21.2o
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