Franklin County landowners push for more dog deer hunting restrictions

Franklin County landowners are calling on county leadership to put more regulation in place during hunting season. Particularly, they want to prevent hunting dogs from coming onto their land without permission.

“Dogs do not respect boundaries, and it’s not their fault,” Jenny Edwards said.

Edwards used to own a well-respected cattle farm in Franklin County with her late husband. She said calving season was during deer season. Even before they sold it in 2001, she said they had issues with dogs coming onto their property.

“The dogs were running across our property in many cases and running newborn calves, which we lost a few that way. We also lost a pregnant cow,” she said.

She said the problem has only gotten worse as the county has become more residential. She said the dogs especially affect livestock.

“We need to preserve all the farming that we possibly can and there again, preserve their livelihood, which is making sure the animals can go from the farm to the plate,” Edwards said.

Connie Jo Hutchinson and Felix Allen have taken their concerns to the county board of commissioners multiple times. They spoke to WRAL earlier this year about the issues they’re seeing.
Allen said he wants to see concrete changes in order to keep hunting safe.

“The only way to solve that is to ask the county commissioners to adopt ordinances that would restrict dog hunting to 500 contiguous acres,” he told WRAL.

He said he wants hunting from the road to be prohibited and for written permission to be required from landowners.

“I became part of an effort to not ban dog hunting but to restrict it to areas where there are larger areas of land, not populated,” Allen said.

“I want accountability on the part of dog hunters,” Hutchinson told WRAL.

Hutchinson said her son’s interest in hunting got her involved with it. However, she said she does not use dogs to catch game. In fact, she said the use of dogs would ruin their hunt, because the deer would run away. She said that is what initially caught her attention when it came to dog deer hunting. From there, she learned of the issues of dogs trespassing on private property.

“Landowners have a constitutional right to the land that they own,” she said.

The NC Wildlife Resources Commission’s responsibility and ethics pamphlet says hunters’ most common issues involve laws regarding trespassing.

Lt. Brandon Coffey told WRAL that the most important thing is where the dogs are released. He said if a dog is released outside of the property line and the dogs then go onto the property while chasing a deer than a citation would not be issued.

“If I stood one foot from the property line on my property and then released my dogs, I have not broken the law,” he explained with an example. “I can walk right up next to the property line, but if I don’t step across the property line, I have not broken a law.”

Coffey said most people follow the law and do not release hunting dogs on private property.

“In fact, right now probably somewhere and in Franklin County, there are people doing things exactly by the law,” he said. “From an agency perspective, the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission supports all legal forms of hunting, whether that be still hunting or hunting with hounds. And again, there’s people that do both right and wrong, just like any other law, there’s people that that do things the right and wrong every single day.”

Edwards said a secondary issue is that dog owners will sometimes leave their dogs behind after hunting season, thus making them strays.

Ultimately, she said she hopes landowners, hunters and the county can work together to come to a compromise.

WRAL reached out to several dog hunting groups, as well as each county commissioner. At the time of this publication, we have not heard back.