Poacher

Poaching has been defined as the illegal hunting or capturing of wild animals, usually associated with land use rights. According to Encyclopædia Britannica, poaching was performed by impoverished peasants for subsistence purposes and a supplement for meager diets. Poaching was as well set against the hunting privileges of nobility and territorial rulers. By contrast, stealing domestic animals (as in cattle raiding, for example) classifies as theft, not as poaching. Since the 1980s, the term 'poaching' has also referred to the illegal harvesting of wild plant species. In agricultural terms, the term 'poaching' is also applied to the loss of soils or grass by the damaging action of feet of livestock which can affect availability of productive land, water pollution through increased runoff and welfare issues for cattle. Austria and Germany refer to poaching not as theft, but as intrusion in third party hunting rights. While Germanic law allowed any free man including peasants to hunt, especially on the commons, Roman law restricted hunting to the rulers. In Medieval Europe feudal territory rulers from the king downward tried to enforce exclusive rights of the nobility to hunt and fish on the lands they ruled. Poaching was deemed a serious crime punishable by imprisonment, but the enforcement was comparably weak until the 16th century. Peasants were still able to continue small game hunting, but the right of the nobility to hunt was restricted in the 16th century and transferred to land ownership. The development of modern hunting rights is closely connected to the comparably modern idea of exclusive private property of land. In the 17th and 18th centuries the restrictions on hunting and shooting rights on private property were being enforced by gamekeepers and foresters. They denied shared usages of forests, e.g. resin collection and wood pasture and the peasant's right to hunt and fish. However, comparably easy access to rifles increasingly allowed peasants and servants to poach by end of the 18th century. The low quality of guns made it necessary to approach to the game as close as 30 m (98 ft). For example, poachers in the Salzburg region then were men around 30 years of age, not yet married and usually alone on their illegal trade. Hunting was used in the 18th century as a theatrical demonstration of aristocratic rule of the land and had a strong impact on land use patterns as well. Poaching in so far interfered not only with property rights but clashed symbolically with the power of the nobility. During the years between 1830 and 1848 poaching and poaching related deaths increased in Bavaria. The revolution of 1848 was interpreted as a general allowance for poaching in Bavaria. The reform of hunting law in 1849 reduced legal hunting to rich land owners and the bourgeoisie able to pay the hunting fees and led to disappointment and ongoing praise of poachers among the people. Some of the frontier region, where smuggling was important, showed especially strong resistance. In 1849, the Bavarian military forces were asked to occupy a number of municipalities on the frontier to Austria. Both, in Wallgau (today a part of Garmisch-Partenkirchen) and in Lackenhäuser, (close to Wegscheid in the Bavarian forest) each household had to feed and accommodate one soldier for a month as part of a military mission to quell the uproar. The people of Lackenhäuser had had several skirmishes about poached deer with Austrian foresters and military, and were known as well armed pertly poachers (kecke Wilderer). Poaching, like smuggling, has a long counter-cultural history. The verb poach is derived from the Middle English word pocchen literally meaning bagged, enclosed in a bag.Poaching was dispassionately reported for England in 'Pleas of the Forest', transgressions of the rigid Anglo-Norman Forest Law. William the Conqueror, who was a great lover of hunting, established and enforced a system of forest law. This operated outside the common law, and served to protect game animals and their forest habitat from hunting by the common people of England and reserved hunting rights for the new French-speaking Anglo-Norman aristocracy. Henceforth hunting of game in royal forests by commoners or in other words poaching, was invariably punishable by death by hanging. In 1087, a poem called 'The Rime of King William' contained in the Peterborough Chronicle, expressed English indignation at the severe new laws. Poaching was romanticised in literature from the time of the ballads of Robin Hood, as an aspect of the 'greenwood' of Merry England; in one tale, Robin Hood is depicted as offering King Richard the Lion Heart venison from deer illegally hunted in the Sherwood Forest, the King overlooking the fact that this hunting was a capital offence. The widespread acceptance of this common criminal activity is encapsulated in the observation Non est inquirendum, unde venit venison ('It is not to be inquired, whence comes the venison'), made by Guillaume Budé in his Traitte de la vénerie. However, the English nobility and land owners were in the long term extremely successful in enforcing the modern concept of property, expressed e.g. in the enclosures of common land and later in the Highland Clearances, which were both forced displacement of people from traditional land tenancies and erstwhile common land. The 19th century saw the rise of acts of legislation, such as the Night Poaching Act 1828 and Game Act 1831 in the United Kingdom, and various laws elsewhere. In North America, the blatant defiance of the laws by poachers escalated to armed conflicts with law authorities, including the Oyster Wars of the Chesapeake Bay, and the joint US-British Bering Sea Anti-Poaching Operations of 1891 over the hunting of seals.