Hunting a deer in the Cascades, casting for salmon on an Oregon river, raising cattle east of the mountains and producing crops in the Rogue, Umpqua and Willamette valleys are activities governed by very different sets of state law. A newly advancing initiative would place them under something they do not currently share: explicit protection in the Oregon Constitution.
Initiative Petition 2028-025 has cleared its first signature requirement and entered Oregon’s ballot-title process, moving forward a proposal that would establish constitutional protections involving hunting, fishing, farming, ranching, trapping, livestock production, growing food and wildlife management.
The development is new even though the initiative was filed earlier this summer. Chief petitioner Kari Goodheart of Irrigon filed IP 25 on June 23. Sponsorship signatures were submitted Aug. 5, and the Oregon Secretary of State determined Aug. 19 that 1,557 valid signatures had been collected, exceeding the 1,000 required to advance the petition.
That verification moved IP 25 from a filed proposal into the next formal stage of Oregon’s initiative system. It did not place the amendment on the ballot.
IP 25 belongs to the 2028 election cycle and would not appear before voters in November 2026. Supporters still face the ballot-title process and, if authorized to circulate the petition, the much larger undertaking of collecting enough valid signatures from registered Oregon voters to qualify a constitutional amendment for the November 2028 general election.
The proposal itself reaches across several areas of Oregon law that ordinarily operate separately.
Hunting and fishing are regulated through licenses, seasons, tags, harvest limits and wildlife conservation rules. Agriculture operates within another extensive framework covering land, livestock, crops, water, animal health and food production. Trapping has its own requirements, while state animal-cruelty laws establish another set of legal boundaries involving the treatment of animals.
IP 25 attempts to place constitutional protection around activities within each of those areas while retaining government authority to regulate them under specified circumstances.
If ultimately approved by voters, the amendment would add a new Section 44 to Article I of the Oregon Constitution. Its protections would encompass hunting, fishing, farming, ranching, trapping, raising livestock, growing food and certain wildlife and natural-resource management activities.
The amendment would not turn those activities into an unrestricted constitutional license.
Oregon could continue establishing hunting and fishing seasons, bag limits and conservation requirements. Wildlife managers could continue using science-based regulations intended to manage populations and protect species. Existing property boundaries would remain enforceable, meaning a constitutional right to hunt would not create a right to enter another person’s land without legal authority.
The proposal also preserves the possibility of civil and criminal consequences for conduct involving negligence, recklessness or intentional wrongdoing. Its protections are directed toward lawful activities and accepted practices rather than creating immunity for conduct merely because it involves an animal, agricultural operation or natural resource.
Where the proposal becomes considerably broader is its treatment of agriculture and animal-welfare law.
The amendment seeks to protect generally accepted practices associated with farming, ranching, livestock production, hunting and related activities from being prohibited by classifying those practices as animal abuse, neglect or cruelty. That provision places some of Oregon’s most established rural industries within the same constitutional proposal as recreational hunting and fishing.
It also connects IP 25 to a larger argument that has already surfaced in Oregon politics.
Previous Oregon initiative efforts have sought substantial changes to laws governing animal breeding and the circumstances under which animals may be injured or killed. Those proposals raised questions about their potential effects on livestock agriculture, slaughter and food production as well as hunting and fishing.
IP 25 travels in the opposite legal direction. Rather than primarily changing Oregon’s criminal statutes governing animals, it seeks to establish constitutional protections for specified activities before future state laws, local ordinances or voter-approved measures could restrict them.
The consequences, should the proposal eventually qualify and win voter approval, would therefore extend beyond hunters and anglers.
Oregon has tens of thousands of farms and ranches spread across a state where agricultural production ranges from cattle and hay to pears, berries, wheat, wine grapes, vegetables, nursery products and grass seed. Fishing and hunting are similarly intertwined with Oregon’s coastal, mountain and inland communities. Wildlife regulation, meanwhile, affects public and private lands from the Pacific Coast to the Idaho border.
Southern Oregon sits squarely within that intersection. Jackson and Josephine counties contain commercial farms, ranches, vineyards, livestock operations, fishing waters, hunting territory and extensive federal and state lands. The region also contains communities where wildlife management regularly intersects with private property, agriculture, recreation and conservation.
Eastern Oregon would encounter many of the same questions through cattle ranching, farming, hunting and large expanses of public land. Coastal communities bring commercial and recreational fishing into the discussion, while voters in the Willamette Valley and Portland metropolitan area would participate equally in determining whether those activities should receive constitutional protection.
Federal land ownership adds another boundary that the amendment could not simply erase. The Bureau of Land Management and other federal agencies administer millions of acres in Oregon under federal law. State hunting and fishing rules generally continue to apply to wildlife activities on those lands, but an amendment to the Oregon Constitution could not override federal statutes or transform federal property into land governed exclusively by Oregon law.
A parallel discussion has also emerged in the Oregon Legislature, where lawmakers have considered pursuing a legislatively referred constitutional amendment involving hunting, fishing, farming and related activities. A legislative referral would follow a different path from the citizen initiative now advancing as IP 25. Either route could potentially place constitutional language before Oregon voters, but neither has yet done so.
For IP 25, the next decisions will concern the words voters could eventually see on a ballot.
Oregon’s ballot-title process produces a formal caption, statements explaining the effect of voting yes or no, and a summary of the measure. That process can include public participation and legal review before a final title is established. Only after the required steps are completed can the initiative move toward the signature-gathering campaign necessary for ballot qualification.
The Aug. 19 verification therefore marks a procedural advancement, not an election victory and not ballot qualification. IP 25 remains several stages away from a statewide vote.
But Oregon now has an active constitutional initiative moving through the state election system that combines subjects rarely contained within a single constitutional question: the hunter in the forest, the angler on the river, the rancher managing livestock, the farmer producing food, the trapper operating under state regulation and the government agencies responsible for managing wildlife and natural resources.
Whether Oregon voters will ultimately decide that question in 2028 remains unsettled. The process that could put it before them is now underway.