After 30 years, debate over doves officially over

Bob Riepenhoff reports in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Jim Weix's recounting of the political battle behind establishing a mourning dove hunting season in Wisconsin in 2003.

In 1971, Weix said, animal rights activists made a clever, if disingenuous, move in an effort to prevent dove hunting in the state. Led by the late Lucile Hunt, the animal rights activists were successful in getting a measure passed by the Legislature removing the mourning dove from the state's list of game birds and designating it as the state's official bird of peace.

In subsequent years, the designation was successfully used to block efforts to permit hunting doves.

Ironically, Weix said, it was the election of an anti-hunter, Patricia Randolph, to the Dane County Conservation Congress in spring of 1999 that gave the mourning dove issue the boost it needed. Unaware that Randolph and a group of supporters were there, many hunters and anglers left the hearing before it ended, while the animal rights contingent stayed. As a result, Randolph was elected to a three-year term.

It's unclear if this is an example of how one side can prevail if it has the meetings run late and the other side is made up of the people who have to get up early the next morning.

Randolph's election served as a wake-up call to the sporting community and, at the hearings the next year, a vote on whether to establish the mourning dove hunt became a rallying point for both hunters and anti-hunters. Some viewed it as a virtual referendum on hunter rights. The result was a record attendance at the hearings and an overwhelming victory for the hunters, with a 21,067 to 6,036 vote in favor of the dove hunt.