Thursday, April 02, 2009
Confrontation between hound hunters, landowners goes high profile
Bill Cochran
Recent columns
Curt Lytle is a bass tournament pro who lives on 157 acres in Isle of Wight County, which is the heart of Virginia’s deer hound hunting country. The county grabbed the reputation of being trophy deer territory in the early 1960s when a hound hunt produced a buck with a massive 26-pound rack that stood as Virginia’s all-time whitetail record for 25 years.
When Lytle moved to his rural property from a subdivision, he got busy developing the land for wildlife. He stocked a 2-acre pound with bass and bluegills and created the kind of habitat that attracts quail, deer and other wildlife. He and his wife, Brandy, have two young daughters.
While Lytle’s business has been bass fishing -- he qualified for three Bassmaster Classics, finishing fifth in 2003, and one FLW Championship -- his passions include bowhunting, outdoor photography, bird watching and camping.
Sounds like the kind of all-American story many outdoorsmen dream about, but Lytle says the serenity has been marred by members of a nearby hunt club who follow their hounds uninvited onto his property, disrupting his own outdoor activities, scaring his girls and causing tense confrontations.
Lytle voiced the problems he said he was encountering during a Department of Game and Inland Fisheries public meeting when the agency was conducting a $70,000 study on hound hunting in Virginia. The final draft of the study was presented in October, and the agency has had little to say on the issue since then. But that’s not the case for Lytle.
On Tuesday, Lytle was in court telling a judge in Isle of Wight County that “We just want to end this.” He and his wife had filed a civil trespassing suit against the hunt, club members.
Duane Rhodes, president of the 38 member Walters Hunt Club, denied that the members had harassed the Lytles.
“We don’t like confrontation any more than the next guy,” the Associated Press quoted Rhodes as saying.
The club’s legal representative is Richard E. Railey, a member of the board of the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries and champion of hound hunting.
At the heart of the case -- in fact, at the heart of the conflict between hound hunters and landowners across the state-- is Virginia’s right-to-retrieve law, which dates back to the 1930s. It gives hunters the right to retrieve their dogs on private property even when access has been denied by the landowner. The only other state to permit this is Minnesota.
Hound hunters say the law is critical to the welfare of their valuable dogs and to their sport. Many landowners say hound hunters abuse the law, adding that it strips them of their property rights.
While Lytle said his legal action was aimed at the hunt club, not the retrieve law, without question the right-to-retrieve law was on trial. The law is destined to draw increasing fire as hound hunters pursue their sport on a landscape that is changing from expansive undeveloped areas to a checkerboard of smaller holdings.
The judge ruled that the hunt club clearly had the right to retrieve on its side and he continued the civic trespass charge to April 22, saying that Curt and Brandy Lytle would have to prove that members of he hunt club intentionally released dogs on their land to hunt.
That may be the end of this case, but it certainly is not the end of the issue.
