Hunters just won one. Oregon’s Initiative Petition 28 — the measure that would have treated legal hunting and fishing as animal cruelty — is officially dead for 2026.
We’ve been tracking this fight all year. When we first covered Oregon’s IP28 and what it could criminalize, the threat was real: a ballot measure in a state where most voters live in cities, aimed straight at the way of life the rest of the state depends on. In late July, Oregon elections officials confirmed the campaign didn’t collect enough valid signatures to put it in front of voters this November.
What IP28 Would Have Done
Quick refresher for anyone who missed it. IP28 — its backers called it the PEACE Act — would have stripped the exemptions in Oregon’s animal-cruelty laws that protect lawful hunting, fishing, trapping, wildlife management, livestock slaughter, animal husbandry, and even pest control.
Strip those exemptions, and everyday activities become prosecutable animal abuse. Fill a deer tag, run a cattle operation, take your kid fishing — all of it lands in the same legal category as cruelty. That’s not an exaggeration of the measure. That was the measure.
The Numbers That Killed It
To qualify for Oregon’s November ballot, the campaign needed 117,173 valid signatures. They turned in more than 142,000 — but when the state verified them, only 104,262 held up.
That left them 12,911 valid signatures short. Close enough that nobody on our side should feel comfortable.
The opposition to IP28 wasn’t just hunters, either. Ranching, agriculture, and business groups lined up against it, and both Oregon’s Democratic governor Tina Kotek and her Republican challenger opposed the measure. When both parties’ candidates for governor agree something is a bad idea, that tells you how far outside the mainstream it was.
Why This Isn’t Over
Here’s the part that matters: the campaign behind IP28 has signaled it may try again. They came within 13,000 signatures with a measure this extreme. Next cycle they’ll be more organized, better funded, and they’ll know exactly how many signatures they left on the table.
This is the same playbook we’ve watched across the West. It’s why Colorado hunters pushed Initiative 302 — the right to hunt and fish — to lock hunting into the state constitution before someone tries the Oregon approach here. And it’s the same fight running underneath the public land sell-off battle: the future of hunting is being decided by people who have never bought a tag.
The lesson from Oregon isn’t “we’re safe.” It’s that organized hunters, ranchers, and anglers can win when they show up — and that the other side only has to win once.
What You Can Actually Do
Three things, none of them complicated:
- Stay a member of something. State wildlife federations and conservation groups did the unglamorous work of fighting IP28. Membership dollars are ammunition.
- Vote in every state election, especially the boring ones. Ballot measures like this live or die on turnout.
- Take somebody hunting. Every new hunter is a new vote, a new license sold, and a new person who understands what’s actually at stake. We talk about this constantly on the Hunt Podcast — the culture only survives if we keep handing it down.
And honestly — the best answer to people trying to end hunting is to keep hunting. If this year’s the year, browse our guided hunt adventures or look at a guided elk hunt with a tag included and put a hunt on the calendar. Questions about where to start? Talk to us — it costs you nothing.
Oregon hunters dodged one. The rest of us should treat it as the warning shot it was.
Hunting is not a hobby. It’s an obsession.
