(Source: MIRS.news, Published 07/06/23) The state has asked a Court of Claims judge to dismiss a counter-lawsuit filed on behalf of a Hanover game hunting ranch, whom the state alleges illegally possesses Russian boar.
Singer-songwriter and outdoorsman Ted Nugent, owner of Sunrize Acres, which is a 340-acre hunting ranch on Luttenton Road, countersued the Michigan Department of Natural Resources seeking to invalidate the state’s Invasive Species Order (ISO) that adds the Russian boar to a list of species prohibited under Part 413 of the Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Act (NREPA).
Assistant Attorney General Keith D. Underkoffler said in a Wednesday filing the state Court of Appeals has “upheld that order against numerous challenges, reasoning that the order ‘was properly issued’ because the DNR had authority to issue it and properly classified Russian boar as a prohibited species.”
In a May 18 Facebook post for his The Nightly Nuge, Nugent called the lawsuit’s language “insane.” He said his “pigs” at Sunrize Acres have not escaped, which means “they can’t be feral” and therefore, the state is “suing me for something that doesn’t exist.”
Nugent also explained that boars are not a species, but a gender and the state is “suing me for having Russian boars, none of which I have.”
In one rant, he said: “They are suing me. The State of Michigan under (Gov.) Gretchen Whitmer – this horrible, communist, Joe Biden gangster, five-family-crime member – and her attorney general, I don’t even know her name, these people are just violating their oath to the Constitution every day, and let me set this up by letting you know that the Department of Natural Resources, who I pay their salary, the hunters, the fishermen, the trappers, and outdoor enthusiasts in Michigan pay the salary to the Department of Natural Resources, and these clowns, these idiots actually are suing me for having feral Russian boar.”
The DNR filed its initial complaint in Ingham County Circuit Court, naming defendants Sunrize Acres, Freedom Ranch and Superior Wildlife Adventures, both in Cornell, and Trophy Ranch in Ubly as well as David VanElsacker, who does business as David's Hog Wild in Northland.
Ingham County Circuit Judge James S. Jamo is expected to hear a motion to change venue on Aug. 9.
The DNR's complaint alleges DNR officers purchased a hunt and collected an animal from each of the defendants' facilities.
A research biologist tested each animal's genomics and the results “strongly supported classification of each animal as a Russian boar or Russian boar hybrid," the state alleges.
Nugent countersued on June 13, alleging the ISO is invalid because it says “possession” of prohibited animals is not allowed, but the relevant state statute, MCL 324.41303(1), says someone “shall not knowingly possess a live organism if the organism is a prohibited species.”
Nugent’s Sunrize Acres says the difference between “possession” and “knowingly possess” invalidates the ISO, but the state counters that Sunrize’s focus on “knowingly” is “puzzling since there is no dispute that Sunrize Acres knowingly possessed the animals at issue.”
Sunrize acknowledges in court filings that it offers hogs for hunting.
