Where does the line between regulations for hunting, trapping, fishing licenses and restrictions and endangered species restrictions and need for survival in wilderness situations break down?
If you are worried about survival, you’re de facto neither worried about complying with local hunting regulations nor the consequences of breaking them.
I think you need to clarify the question if you want any other serious response.
It’s up to whatever relevant agency whether they want to charge you or not, and I’d suspect that if it’s a genuine survival situation and you really did need to break whatever rule to survive, they’re probably not going to. Perhaps they would if you were doing something spectacularly stupid to get into the survival situation in the first place.
In general, the authorities try not to hold people responsible for things they do in such situations because they want people to do what they need to do to survive without worrying about the consequences when they’re back to civilization. For example, you’ll (almost) never be held responsible for search and rescue costs, no matter how stupid you’ve been, because they don’t want people NOT calling for help because they’re worried about getting stuck with the bill.
Most jurisdictions have a rule exculpating an otherwise guilty offender on the basis of “extraordinary emergency” or “necessity”. Thus, if you don’t have a driver’s licence, but you’re in the wilderness and suddenly your mate has a heart attack and there is no other way to get to hospital, you can drive. Much depends on the circumstances of each case of course (you couldn’t rely on it to go and get more beer if your party was running dry, for example) and each jurisdiction will have circumscriptions about the exact scope of the defence, but generally that’s where you find the law’s solution to the dilemma.
The common law’s most famous case is Dudley and Stephens, who cannabilised a shipmate. The courts said the defence did not extend that far, so it provides an example of the limits to the principle.
I would have to think it all lot of it would be intent. If someone went out to the woods, intending to feast on endangered animals then it wouldn’t matter that much if the person was starving to death, it wouldn’t excuse the behavior. Also if the person was negligent, not packing enough food or training like Christopher McCandless in Into The Wild, he/she may be charged.
I had thought that search and rescue costs were significant and passed on to the rescuee if the situation was found to be his or her fault – is this incorrect?
Search and rescue costs are often very significant, but for the most part they’re not passed on the the rescuee. You can get charged for stuff like medivac helicopters and other outside help, but for the most part S&R groups don’t charge, or only charge some token amount (for example, Oregon S&R groups can, at their discretion, charge $500 per rescuee, which rarely covers actual costs). They’re worried not only about people not calling at all because of the cost, but also situations can become much more dangerous if people wait to call for help.
Hmm. Good to know. I definitely would’ve hesitated before asking for help.
I think that authorities reserve the option to charge for search and rescue in really egregious cases like fraud (I seem to remember there was talk of charging the Heene family for the Balloon Boy incident, but the Wikipedia page isn’t clear that they paid for S&R).
I can tell you confidently that some of the poorer residents of Iron County, Missouri (whence Mrs. Homie hails) rely on [del]poaching[/del] off-season hunting in order to put food on their table. Literally. I am not making this up.
The Missouri Department of Conservation tends to look the other way in the cases of genuine need. In the case of avid hunters who just can’t wait until huntin’ season, not so much.
(not legal advice)
As I believe has already been stated, there is a legal doctrine of “necessity” that permits one to break the law in a bona fide emergency situation. In the movie “The Day After Tomorrow” the people trapped in the library loot a snack vending machine, take food from a ship’s galley (both would normally be considered Theft), and burn library books (Arson) for heat, but their actions would probably not lead to a conviction because of the emergency situation. In order to have the defense, the situation can’t have been your fault or reasonably avoidable, and you can’t break the law beyond that which is reasonably necessary (for example you can’t poach more animals than reasonably necessary to survive). I believe the defense is limited to true emergency situations, so just being poor is never a defense, since you could have gotten a job or went on welfare.
My understanding is that other examples of this could be DUI or driving on a suspended license in order to get yourself or someone else to the hospital during a heart attack (when nobody else can or will drive), pretty much any traffic offense in order to escape from a killer tornado (unless you intentionally first got too close for comfort), killing in self-defense or defense of others, etc.
Take a look at Necessary - Wikipedia for an introduction.
Related to survival of a different sort.
A friend of mine shot a cougar last year while he was out deer hunting. He found that the cougar was stalking him and it wouldn’t back down when he yelled at it, it kept advancing on him, so he shot it.
He did not possess a tag to hunt cougar even though the season was open. He called the Fish & Game Dept. to report it. They took the animal but he didn’t get in any trouble at all, they were fine with his reasoning. No fine, no warning, no stern talking to, just a ‘have a nice day’ and maybe you should buy a cougar tag next year too.
What if you’re Muslim or Jewish and there are like 100 feral pigs and only like 2 or 3 rare sheep. And you eat the sheep instead? 