LAST UPDATED: May 1st, 2015
The “Motor City Madman” Ted Nugent is in trouble with the law once again, this time with Federal Wildlife Officials, after taking a black bear in Alaska in May of 2009.
Nugent was filming for his television series, “Spirit of the Wild”, on Sukkwan Island, south of Hydaburg and part of the Tongass National Forest in Alaska when the incident occurred. Federal prosecutors say that it was here where Ted wounded a bear that was attracted to a bait station. The arrow grazed that animal and it scurried away alive.
Four days later Nugent shot and killed another bear, airing the footage on his television series. It remains unclear if a viewer notified authorities or if investigators saw the show themselves.
According to Alaska State regulations set for Game Management Unit 2, by striking the first bear and killing the second, Nugent exceeded his bag limit. What’s more, by transporting the illegally taken second bear off of federal property, Nugent was in violation of the Lacey Act, the law that prohibits the sale and/or transport of illegally harvested wildlife and plants.
Ted Nugent happily sits behind one of his many bear harvests.
The agreement between Nugent and prosecutors is set to be entered into court next week. Nugent will face a $10,000 fine and be banned from hunting or fishing the state of Alaska and any other U.S. Forest Service land nationwide for one year. He will also be given two years’ probation, and must create a 30-60 second public service announcement about responsible hunting to be aired weekly on his television show.
Nugent’s lawyer, Wayne Anthony Ross, had this to say in a phone interview with the Anchorage Daily News, “they’ve got apparently some crazy law in the Southeast that says if you even touch an animal with an arrow, it becomes your animal. He looked to see if he had hit it and didn’t believe that he’d hit it fatally. There wasn’t any blood trail that they could find. There was a little blood apparently at the spot, but nothing that indicated the bear was hard hit.”
Nugent and his hunting party looked adamantly for the first bear but didn’t find it. “The bear didn’t die”, Ross continued, “He only took one bear.”
Nugent is no stranger to hunting in the state of Alaska and was unaware of this (newer) law which came into effect less than five years ago. He was unavailable for comment.
This is not Ted’s first hunting violation; he pleaded no contest in 2010 for California charges of baiting a deer and improperly signing his hunting tag in 2009. He lost his privilege to hunt California until June of 2012.
