From IP 28 culture war to common ground: Marty Wilde suggests a constitutional right to feed ourselves
6 min read
by Marty Wilde
Growing up in the Coast Range, I used to love swimming in the Hult Millpond. I’d work with my dad on our farm in the morning, then bike down for a swim in the afternoon. There, I’d see my neighbors, including hippies, loggers, and bikers, along with day-trippers from town, swimming, fishing, and boating. We converged in that place of natural beauty to enjoy Oregon, despite our divisions.
Ask Oregonians what they love about this state and the answers converge fast. Across urban and rural, Democrat and Republican, east and west, we value the natural environment for recreation and sustenance. This agreement crosses party lines and the Cascades, but our politics almost never reflect the agreement.
This summer produced two proposals that failed to represent that agreement in opposite directions. Oregon can do better by forming a conservation alliance that embodies our shared values.
Initiative Petition 28 would have stripped the animal-cruelty exemptions from Oregon law, exposing hunting, fishing, livestock husbandry, and some breeding practices to criminal liability. Supporters submitted 142,784 signatures, but the measure failed to qualify for the November 2026 ballot.
The moral concern animating supporters is real. Animals do suffer, and some of that suffering happens inside industrial confinement operations few of us would want to see up close. People of conscience disagree about how much of it a food system should tolerate.
But IP 28 swept in a rancher near Burns, a Warm Springs fisherman, a retired machinist filling his freezer with venison, and a family raising four chickens in Springfield. Oregon’s nine federally recognized tribes opposed it, because treaty-protected hunting and fishing drew no exemption. A remedy aimed at industrial practice would have criminalized activities many of us enjoy.
On Aug. 4, Republican legislative leaders announced a resolution to refer a constitutional amendment to voters. The amendment would protect the right to hunt, fish, gather wild foods, and raise animals or crops. Sen. Christine Drazan, the Republican nominee for governor, announced it at a Gresham meat market.
On the merits, the proposal has a genuine virtue and a serious flaw. The virtue is that constitutional text provides the kind of stability a statute does not. The flaw is that the text hasn’t actually had any teeth in the 24 other states that have tried it.
Almost half the states protect hunting and fishing in their constitutions. Searching the reported case law, I have not been able to find a single published appellate decision striking down a wildlife statute or regulation as a violation of one of them. What the cases do show is a consistent pattern of courts reading these provisions as declarations of values rather than as actual constraints.
Maine tested the strongest version. Voters approved a right to food in 2021, covering the growing, harvesting, and consuming of food of one’s own choosing. Virginia and Joel Parker, who hunt to help feed their five children, then challenged Maine’s Sunday hunting ban, arguing that Sunday was the only day work and school allowed the family to hunt together.
In 2024, the Maine Law Court upheld the ban. The court accepted that harvesting includes hunting, and it accepted that the Parkers hunted for food rather than for sport. It ruled against them anyway, on the strength of the carve-out for poaching. Poaching, the court reasoned, means taking game illegally. The Sunday ban makes Sunday hunting illegal. Therefore Sunday hunting is poaching and not protected.
That chain of reasoning makes the scope of a constitutional right depend too much on legislative restraint. Maine’s drafters made two mistakes. First, they declared a right without telling courts what standard to apply to laws burdening it. Then, they wrote an exception broad enough to swallow it.
Any amendment following the 23-state template gives hunters and farmers a plaque. Oregon should write something that works.
Here is what I would put before voters. The amendment does six things:
- It states that all residents enjoy a right to hunt, fish, trap, forage, garden, farm, and raise animals in order to feed themselves and their household.
- It tells courts how hard to look at laws that burden that right, and it lists the state interests that justify a burden, with conservation first.
- When a run or a herd cannot support every use, it puts household food behind treaty harvest and ahead of sport and sale.
- It gives tribes a constitutional right to government-to-government consultation with a real remedy attached.
- It leaves the State’s power to punish cruelty and set husbandry standards alone.
- It obliges the State to conserve the natural resources that make these rights possible.
It supplies the standard Maine omitted. Conservation comes first. The Department of Fish and Wildlife keeps every tool it has, including seasons, tags, limits, closures, and species recovery, so long as it writes findings to explain what it is doing. What the State loses is the power to end household food harvest outright. It also closes the Maine trapdoor, so the legislature cannot shrink the right simply by outlawing more.
The right becomes something more than paper. When the fish are scarce, food comes before sport and before sale. That provision reflects the values most Oregonians share.
It also gives the state an affirmative duty of stewardship, with a defined remedy and defined limits. Hunting, fishing, and farming depend on conserving the environment. Protecting the practice while neglecting the conditions that produce it protects nothing at all.
To some, this may read like an environmental litigation engine bolted onto a hunting amendment. But the duty binds the State and no one else. It creates no cause of action against a private party, works no taking, and grants no authority to void a lawful private use.
The remedy is a remand to do the analysis properly. The fact that any Oregonian may bring the claim cuts in every direction. A rancher whose water is being reallocated by a state decision has exactly the same standing as a conservation group in Portland.
We all share a stewardship duty. Neither side gets to pass the package and then litigate away the half it never wanted. Binding everything together protects the actual bargain. Harvest rights are traded for stewardship duties.
The allocation priority is the fight. Oregon currently allocates heavily toward recreational and commercial harvest, and this reorders that by constitutional command. Commercial fishers and sport groups will object. But their rights are protected as well, to the extent that they intend to eat what they take. What they may not do is designate household use and then sell the meat.
Oregon’s constitution forbids granting any citizen a privilege that does not belong equally to all citizens. Eligibility turns on the use made of the harvest, not on where you live, what you earn, or who your grandparents were. Anyone who eats what he takes qualifies, in Lakeview or in Northeast Portland.
Nothing here protects a confinement operation, blocks a stocking-density rule, or shields anyone from a cruelty prosecution. What it protects is a person feeding a household. If your objection to the current food system is industrial scale, this text leaves you every tool you need and gives up only the one that was never going to work. Oregonians were never going to pass a criminal statute pointed at a family in Springfield with four chickens.
Oregonians agree about many things. We want to eat food we understand. We want our kids to learn where food comes from. We want salmon in the rivers and elk in the hills for our kids and grandkids.
Rural and urban Oregonians differ about method and about pace, but we rarely differ about the goal. Oregonians should be able to feed themselves, keep their outdoor traditions, and hand down the living systems that make those traditions possible. We should have a constitution that protects them.
Sadly, the millpond has to be drained to prevent its earthen dam from collapsing. But perhaps we can vote to make the smaller lake that will remain a place we all can enjoy.
Marty Wilde represented central Lane and Linn counties in the Oregon legislature. For more of his Letters From a Recovering Politician, subscribe at https://martywilde.substack.com/subscribe.
Copyright (c) 2026 Marty Wilde. All rights reserved. Reprinted by KEPW-Whole Community News with the author’s permission.
