Initiative Petition 28 needed 117,173 valid signatures to make Oregon's November ballot. After two rounds of verification, they came up with 104,262. The People for the Elimination of Animal Cruelty Exemptions Act — the most misleading name ever — is dead.

They tried to criminalize fishing and basic pest control. Stop laughing, this isn't a joke.

The petition wasn't some modest tweak to wildlife management. The measure would have criminalized hunting, fishing, trapping, livestock production, and even basic pest control.

The backers submitted more than 142,000 initial signatures, which sounds impressive until the state started checking. Two rounds of verification later, they were roughly 13,000 short. Turns out a lot of people who sign petitions at farmers' markets aren't actually registered voters.

Oregon Governor Tina Kotek — not exactly a darling of the Second Amendment crowd — put out a statement that landed somewhere between relief and damage control. "I'm relieved IP-28 failed to qualify for the November ballot," Kotek said. "Efforts to criminalize activities like hunting and fishing are wrong for Oregon."

When your own progressive governor has to publicly distance herself from your initiative, you've overplayed your hand.

Kotek won the governor's mansion in 2022 by a margin of just 3.5%, running against Republican Christine Drazan in what turned out to be one of the tightest gubernatorial races in recent Oregon history. That kind of margin doesn't leave room for telling sportsmen they're criminals. She read the room.

Animal rights activists have been trying variations of this playbook for years — wrap a radical policy in compassionate-sounding language, collect signatures from college towns and Portland coffee shops, and hope rural Oregon doesn't notice until it's too late. Rural Oregon noticed.

Hunting and fishing aren't hobbies in these communities. They're how families eat, how kids learn patience and responsibility, how land gets managed. Telling a rancher he can't control pests on his own property isn't animal rights activism. It's a declaration of war on a way of life by people who've never set foot on a working farm.

Sometimes democracy works exactly the way it's supposed to.