A Right as Old as America

By Chester Moore

Two hundred fifty years after America’s founding generation wrote hunting and fishing into the laws of a new nation, Colorado voters, and perhaps soon Oregon, are confronting those questions again.

Before there was a United States Constitution, Americans were already writing the liberty to hunt and fish into the founding documents of their new states. In 1776, a revolution was underway. Americans were fighting for independence while deciding what their new governments would look like and what liberties they should protect.

In Pennsylvania, hunting and fishing made the list. Pennsylvania’s Constitution of Sept. 28, 1776, gave inhabitants the liberty to hunt and fowl in “seasonable times” on lands they held and other unenclosed lands, and to fish in waters that were not private property.

Vermont followed in 1777. Its constitution protected hunting, fowling and fishing while expressly placing those activities under regulations to be established by the General Assembly.

Then, in 1779, Vermont established a deer season.Before the American Revolution was over, the liberty to hunt and the authority to regulate hunting for wildlife conservation were already being established side by side. Those words also reflected a break with the past. Americans had inherited an English system in which access to fish and game had long been tangled with land, class, status and privilege. The emerging American approach represented something different.

Today there is another dimension. Hunters and anglers increasingly find wildlife policy contested through ballot initiatives, legislation and litigation rather than solely through wildlife agencies and commissions.

Critics have given that trend a name: ballot-box biology. Can a constitutional right to hunt and fish provide another safeguard for professional wildlife management? Colorado may be about to provide part of the answer.

Colorado at the Center

Colorado voters will consider Amendment 83, the Constitutional Right to Hunt and Fish, in the 2026 general election. The proposal began as Initiative 302 and is now officially listed by the Colorado General Assembly as an active constitutional amendment.

The proposal would establish a constitutional right to hunt, fish, and take fish and wildlife, including through traditional methods. It preserves the state’s ability to regulate wildlife and does not authorize trespass on private property.

Dan Gates, executive director of Coloradans for Responsible Wildlife Management, said the amendment could provide another layer of protection against future attempts to move wildlife decisions away from professional management.

“This would help create a barrier and somewhat of a roadblock, although it’s not going to stop everything,” Gates said. “The agency still has the unequivocal authority depending on what science says.”

That is especially relevant to wild sheep conservation, where professional management can involve disease surveillance, population monitoring, captures, collars, habitat work, translocations and carefully regulated hunting.

The Wild Sheep Foundation (WSF) has been carefully monitoring the issue. In a June episode of its Sheep Fever podcast featuring Gates, WSF described Colorado as a “proving ground for ballot-box wildlife management,” framing the constitutional effort within the larger fight over hunting and science-based professional wildlife management.

Colorado’s history helps explain why.

Wildlife questions involving bears, trapping, wolves and, most recently, mountain lions and bobcats have repeatedly gone directly before voters. Those individual fights are not the same as Amendment 83, but collectively they have forced sportsmen, conservation organizations and wildlife professionals to devote substantial attention and resources to political battles. Gates said that repeated process carries another cost.

“It’s been a time-consuming, costly venture,” he said. Money, manpower and professional time consumed through political and legal battles cannot simultaneously be directed toward habitat, research, disease response and other boots-on-the-ground conservation. Gates said the constitutional effort is intended in part to keep sportsmen and wildlife managers from repeatedly refighting the fundamental question of how wildlife should be managed.

His view is decidedly long-term. “We’re trying to get this across the finish line, not just for now, but for five years from now and 10 years from now and 50 years from now,” Gates said.

Twenty-Four States

Colorado would not be entering uncharted territory.

According to the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation (CSF), 24 states currently guarantee the right to hunt and fish in their constitutions. They are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

Florida was the most recent addition, added in 2024. Vermont’s protection dates to 1777. The other current constitutional provisions have been adopted since 1996.
Brent Miller, vice president of policy for CSF, said putting the right into a constitution does not eliminate ordinary wildlife regulations.

“It doesn’t create a free-for-all,” Miller said.

States can still establish seasons, bag limits and other regulations needed to manage wildlife. “What we’re doing with the constitutional right to hunt and fish amendments is it’s granting the individual’s right to hunt and fish,” Miller said. “It doesn’t speak to the commercial aspect. This is a right inherent to the individual.”

Evidence shows those words can matter after Election Day.

Listen to Ground Zero Colorado with Dan Gates

Dan Gates of Coloradans for Responsible Wildlife Management joins Sheep Fever to discuss Colorado’s ongoing wildlife policy battles, including wolf reintroduction, predator management, and the effort to establish a Constitutional Right to Hunt and Fish.

When the Words Get Tested

Nebraska voters added a constitutional right to hunt, fish and harvest wildlife in 2012. The amendment also declared public hunting, fishing and harvesting wildlife to be preferred means of managing and controlling wildlife.

Afterward came the mountain lions. In 2014, the Nebraska Legislature passed LB 671, which would have eliminated the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission’s authority to issue mountain lion hunting permits. Gov. Dave Heineman vetoed it.

Heineman called the bill poor public policy and said he was concerned it was “potentially unconstitutional,” particularly citing the right-to-hunt-and-fish amendment voters had approved two years earlier. The Legislature failed to override the veto. Miller cited the Nebraska episode as an example of constitutional language serving as a form of “preemptive defense.”

Only two years after Nebraska voters amended their constitution, those words had entered an actual fight over wildlife management. North Carolina provides a newer and very different example.

Voters there approved a constitutional right to hunt, fish and harvest wildlife in 2018. In August 2026, Wake County Superior Court ruled in favor of the Coastal Conservation Association of North Carolina and 86 individual citizens in a lawsuit challenging the state’s management of coastal fisheries.

The 190-page ruling followed a six-week trial and held the state liable for breaching its legal obligations to North Carolina citizens. The case centered in part on rights to fish and harvest fish protected under the state constitution and public-trust doctrine. Further proceedings over remedies are expected. Miller pointed to the North Carolina ruling as another example of constitutional language having consequences beyond Election Day, calling the result “very affirming” for sportsmen, women and recreational anglers.
Nebraska involved a governor considering legislation. North Carolina involved a courtroom and coastal fisheries. The circumstances could hardly be more different, but both show that constitutional language does not necessarily remain ceremonial.

Oregon Looks Ahead

Oregon may become the next major Western battleground.

Like Colorado, Oregon has faced repeated fights over hunting, trapping, and wildlife management. Most recently, Initiative Petition 28 proposed sweeping changes to the state’s animal-abuse laws that would have removed exemptions affecting hunting, fishing, trapping and agriculture. Amy Patrick, a lobbyist and policy representative for the Oregon Chapter of WSF, and a WSF Women Hunt® Field to Fork alumni, warned in an Oregon Hunters Association legislative update that its reach went even to “trapping mice and vermin.”

IP28 ultimately failed to qualify for the 2026 ballot, but it became another chapter in Oregon’s continuing debate over hunting, fishing and wildlife policy.
Patrick said Oregon sportsmen have already pursued legislative right-to-hunt-and-fish proposals. In 2025, Senate Joint Resolution 13 proposed amending the Oregon Constitution to recognize a right to fish, hunt or harvest wildlife and gather wild foods, subject to legal restrictions. It did not advance to voters.

Another proposal has now entered Oregon’s initiative process for 2028. Petition 2028-025 was filed June 23, 2026, and proposes protections involving hunting, fishing, farming, trapping, ranching, growing food and wildlife management. Oregon Secretary of State records show 1,557 sponsorship signatures were verified Aug. 19 and a draft ballot title was received Aug. 26.

It has not yet qualified for the 2028 ballot. Patrick said getting the language right will be critical. “There’s a lot of moving pieces right now in Oregon,” she said.
“I think it’s worth kind of stepping back from, like, this rush to be the first ones out and just say, ‘What do we really need to protect? What’s the appropriate language that we need to protect?’” Patrick said.

Her concerns include whether proposed language would withstand future legal challenges and whether it could unite Oregon’s different sporting organizations.
Whatever language ultimately emerges, Patrick said science-based wildlife management “has to be at the heart of it.”

“We’re trying to maintain,” she said. She believes Oregon could become an important next chapter in the national effort. “I think Oregon’s going to be the next frontier for the right to hunt and fish efforts, most definitely,” Patrick said. woman with caribou and children in the field

Ryan Miller

If Not Me Now, Me Next

Oregon also provides a lesson from an earlier ballot fight.

In 1994, voters approved Measure 18, which ended the use of hounds for sport hunting cougars and imposed restrictions involving dogs and bait for bears.
Patrick remembers another part of that campaign: how some hunters responded when those methods didn't affect them personally. “They’re like, ‘Well, I don’t do that, so I don’t need to worry about it, right? I’m not going to vote,’” Patrick said.

She said Oregon sporting groups increasingly recognize that a fight involving another hunter’s species or method may still have implications for them. The Oregon Sportsmen’s Conservation Partnership has adopted a phrase that reflects that view: “If not me now, me next.”

The timing of Vermont’s decision is worth remembering. In 1777, its founders were creating a government in the middle of the American Revolution. The same constitution addressed extraordinary issues for its time, including slavery and servitude, religious liberty, voting and education. Among the matters they considered important enough to put into that founding document were hunting and fishing.

Two years later, Vermont established a deer season. From the beginning, protecting the opportunity to hunt and conserving wildlife were not necessarily competing ideas.
Now, as the United States marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, that old question has returned in a distinctly modern form. Twenty-four states have constitutional protections for hunting and fishing. Colorado voters will decide in November whether to become the 25th, while Oregon sportsmen are considering what protections may be needed there.

The language is modern. The political battles certainly are. But Americans have debated the place of hunting, fishing, and wildlife conservation in their system of government almost from the beginning. What happens next may help determine how that tradition and the wildlife it has helped conserve are carried forward for generations to come.

As the issue moves forward in Colorado, Oregon and elsewhere, WSF will continue to follow it.

Contributing Author: Chester Moore is an award-winning wildlife journalist, wildlife photographer, and lifelong hunter from Texas. He operates the Higher Calling Wildlife® blog and podcast and contributes to many outdoors publications.

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