Poaching is a serious offense, and I’m glad this guy got the hammer. Now if only they’ll crack down on commercial shops for selling tons of items made out of shells from the beach. It’s illegal yet plenty of shops in California carry shells out the wazoo
Personal use only! I swear they were for personal use!
Absolutely appropriate response for abalone poaching. The Book has been well and truly thrown.
Seriously, fuck this guy.
Parts of Florida are lousy with tourist traps like this, and although I understand they get their shells from outside the US, it’s still destructive. I guess people are still unable to see nature as a finite resource.
My Uncle was a fisherman in California. They are serious about their laws. He bitched about how many regulations he had to keep up with to make a living.
He has an old fishing license they don’t issue anymore that grandfathered him in for being able to … something. Fish salmon, I think. He ended up selling it when he retired for like $40k.
I’m going to guess that the guy was poor and/or brownish.
But maybe in Cali environmental enforcement doesn’t work the way it does here? Around here it seems like only people of color are busted by the Good Ol’ Boys of DNREC. WASPs need not be concerned as long as a newspaper doesn’t take up the cause. Oh, wait, I meant the newspaper since there’s only one left, and it’s just a Gannet UStoday remix rag with a few local pages.
OK… I’m looking now… last name Nguyen, sounds pretty Vietnamese to me… not very WASPy.
Perhaps I should try that. The few times I’ve tried abalone I haven’t cared for it, but that was sushi. Maybe I’d prefer it cooked.
Also it’s nice to hear a story about environmental regulations being taken seriously for a change.
DFG in Northern California is very equal opportunity. They arrest poachers.
He is potentially Hmong. They get into a lot of issues with F&G in Mendo, Mainly for hunting though.
That said, white guys get whacked there too. Noyo Harbor is a busy place.
You can put a racial spin on it if you like. Did you read the article?
"Wildlife officers charged Nguyen with poaching abalone and selling them for personal profit, Foy said.
“Nguyen is a repeat offender with multiple convictions for similar poaching crimes,” Foy said… Nguyen pleaded guilty to one felony count of forging an abalone report card and one misdemeanor count of taking abalone for commercial purposes, Foy said.
emphasis mine.
I’d rather not spin, makes me dizzy. I was happy to hear @AcerPlatanoides and @jlw report that the California enviro-cops are not like the ones here in Delaware.
Around here so-called “officers of the law” literally run illegal dumping operations in broad daylight in collusion with employees of the state Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control. I’m totally not kidding; at this point it’s a matter of record, since occasionally somebody doesn’t pay the right bribes and ends up like William Daisey (DNREC manager convicted in 2005 of running the Doxsee Clam dump site in Lewes). Happy customers at the illegal dump sites are typically contractors who look quite a bit different from these guys. I can’t claim to be knowledgeable about how it all works, but I do know from personal observation that brown people and out-of-state people get popped while local palefaces are protected.
It is legal to sell abalone shells you acquired from one of the many commercial abalone farms in California, legally imported from outside of California or that was captured by a licensed diver prior to 1997. You have to have documentation though.
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