A group of hunters in Maine has sued the state over what they say is an unconstitutional ban on Sunday hunting.
The state has imposed a Sunday hunting ban for the last 139 years, and hunters have been unsuccessful over the last several years in their legislative attempts to reverse it. Now, a group called Maine Hunters United for Sunday Hunting (MHUSH) believes they’ll find success taking their case to the courts.
The state enshrined a “right to food” in its constitution via a referendum vote last year, according to local media. That amendment, found in Article I, Section 25, states that Mainers have a “natural, inherent, and inalienable right to food, including… the right to grow, raise, harvest, produce, and consume the food of their own choosing.”
Jared Fornstein of MHUSH believes this amendment makes it unconstitutional for the state to prohibit hunters from hunting on Sundays.
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“What this amendment does not say is that Mainers cannot harvest game on arbitrarily established religious days,” he told reporters outside the courthouse. “Harvesting game meat can be a recreation, but for the majority of Mainers who chose to hunt, it is spiritual, ancestral, and economic necessity.”
The plaintiff in the case is a mother of five named Virginia Parker. Her husband works Monday through Friday, and she says Saturdays are not enough time to harvest food for their family.
“Opening up Sunday hunting would allow our family to go out on weekend hunting trips together as a family. We can teach our children how to properly and safely harvest animals,” Parker said. “And we would have more opportunity to feed our family an organic, natural, God-given gift of wildlife.”
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The Maine legislature considered a bill this year that would have opened hunting on Sundays throughout the state, but it failed in the Inland Fisheries and Wildlife Committee on an 8-3 vote.
Maine allows hunters to hunt on private land if the land is not posted with “No Trespassing” signs. The bill would have required hunters to secure permission to hunt on Sundays in the southern portion of the state, but hunters would have been allowed to hunt in the northern portion of the state without securing permission.
Landowners told the committee that they opposed removing the ban because they like being able to use their land on Sundays without having to think about hunters. Hunters pointed out that hunting seasons only last a few weeks, and landowners are free to prohibit hunting on their land entirely.