My name is Mary Birckhead, a resident as well as a landowner in Southampton County, hunter and hound owner.  The direction of hunting in the Commonwealth is concerning to say the least.  Several factors have snowballed in our state that have allowed us to come to this point.  The county in which I reside has slowly degraded to home divisions where Century farms once thrived.  Those who are large landowners such as my own family have had generation after generations of farmers who are faced with an insurmountable disregard of and lack of support to continuing their livelihood.  This in turn has led to landowners selling off or dividing up large tracts of land or selling off road frontage.  My family instilled in me a love for hunting, hounds, and the land that is unfortunately in my hands sooner than I could have even imagined.  I vividly remember my father talking about the threats to hunting as a child and learning the meaning of the phrase of "there are come heres and from heres". The lesson being that the 'come heres' were going to be the biggest threat to everything we have and love, to include hunting.  

I now have my own little girl who shares the love that both my husband and I have for hunting and our hounds.  Our hounds are not allowed to run on the "outside" as we cannot imagine having to come home and tell our little girl that one of her pets (as that is what they are) were hit by a vehicle while her father was holding the collar of the hound trying to get them out of the road as someone yelled obscenities or shot by another landowner with the collars removed as a weak attempt to cover the crime, and then buried in a shallow grave on the property of which the hound was perceived as "trespassing". All of the previous examples are not some form of fiction but rather a painful truth of just two actual events that occurred in the Commonwealth just in the last deer season. Both in which the hunters were utilizing GPS collars and making reasonable efforts to retrieve their hounds or prevent them from entering another property.

In turn the option to run our hounds on the "inside" of a fenced preserve was also severely wounded with the passage of § 29.1-525.2 in 2014.  As politely as I can say this, the Commonwealth can't ride two horses with one behind.  Reasonable accommodations need to be made on all sides. The two regulations proposed are already common practices by responsible hound hunters within the Commonwealth with making reasonable efforts to prevent a hound from entering, retrieving their hound another property and the utilization of GPS collars, and will truly not make the progress that is anticipated or wanted.  

To say that I oppose the proposed regulations is a wild understatement.  They will not be effective in any manner and will only incite further tensions between landowners and hound hunters.  The other truth to this proposal is that DWR does not have the manpower or funding to be able to implement, investigate, and maintain these regulations.  I would strongly suggest that our legislators revisit this subject and seek additional comments from both sides before another proposal is made.