Let’s be honest about something that the hunting industry’s biggest organizations don’t want you to say out loud. Christmas is open season for wildlife criminals.

Not metaphorically. Literally. Across the United States, Christmas Day has become one of the most dangerous days of the year for wildlife — and one of the safest days of the year to be a poacher. Wardens are home with their families. Dispatch runs skeleton crews. Patrol units are sparse. And the people who exploit that — who choose to spend Christmas morning in the dark killing protected animals instead of opening presents with their grandkids or watching football or spreading any kind of goodwill — are telling you exactly who they are.

A Pattern Across America

Before we get to Wisconsin, let’s establish that this is not an isolated incident. It is a national pattern.

Pat Quaintance: The Man, The Network, The Third Strike

Patrick Quaintance of Bayfield is not a random Wisconsin resident who panicked in the dark on Christmas morning. He is one of the most deeply embedded anti-wolf operatives in Wisconsin’s wildlife management system — a man who spent decades inside the very institutions charged with protecting the animals he sought to eliminate.

At the time of the shooting, Quaintance was:

• President, Wisconsin Association of Sporting Dogs — which advocates for hunting wolves and bears with hounds
• Member, Wisconsin Conservation Congress — holding positions on the fur harvest and bear committees
• Vice Chairman, Bayfield County Deer Advisory Council
• Past President, Wisconsin Wildlife Federation
• Former member, DNR Wolf Management Plan Committee
• Former DNR Conservation Warden — still collecting a state pension from Wisconsin taxpayers at the time of the shooting

This man wrote policy. He sat on committees. He shaped the very rules he then broke — repeatedly. Because this was not his first offense. Quaintance had already been cited twice before for violations of conservation law. Christmas 2023 was strike three.

Here is the timeline that makes his self-defense claim collapse entirely.

In November 2023 — one month before the shooting — Quaintance posted a trail camera photo of a wolf on his property to Facebook. In the comments, someone asked what he was baiting the wolves with. He was luring wolves onto his property with food.

On December 19, 2023 — six days before the shooting — Quaintance testified before the Wisconsin State Senate’s sporting heritage committee. He told lawmakers that wolves were “getting bolder” and had come within 100 yards of his home. He complained that the state was “taking away his rights” to trap and hunt wolves on his property. He was building a public record. He was setting up a narrative.

Six days later, at 1 a.m. on Christmas morning, the wolf was dead.

The wolf he killed was not a threat. She was a 13-year-old toothless female elder from the Echo Valley pack — lured off the Red Cliff Ojibwe Reservation with bait, collared, and studied for nine years by the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. During that time she had given birth to 35 pups. She had no teeth. She posed no threat to a former game warden standing at his back door.

She was a long-standing colleague for a lot of people up here.

— Genevieve Adamski, Wildlife Specialist, Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa

The loss of nine years of irreplaceable research data — 35 pups, population estimates, home ranges, pack dynamics — cannot be measured in a fine. And yet that is exactly what the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service delivered: a fine. Amount undisclosed. No criminal charges. No jail time. When reached by phone, Quaintance said the case “is over and done with” and hung up.

The Network That Protects Him

Here is what happened next — and why it matters far beyond one man in Bayfield County.

Within days, Hunter Nation’s Wisconsin director organized a GoFundMe to cover Quaintance’s legal fees and personally committed to matching the first $5,000.

Hunter Nation. The same organization connected to efforts to support Tom Tiffany’s political ambitions. The same network that has helped set up meetings between anti-wolf operatives and state agencies. The organization that GLWA believes played a significant role in the chaos surrounding the 2021 Wisconsin wolf hunt — an event most people describe as going “over quota,” but that we will call what it was: organized poaching. Those hunters didn’t accidentally exceed their quota by 100 wolves. That was coordinated. That was planned. And it was executed by people who knew exactly what they were doing and calculated, correctly, that the consequences would be minimal.

Hunter Nation also sank $1.8 million into the Brad Schimel Wisconsin Supreme Court race.

Meanwhile Quaintance — a man with two prior conservation violations, a documented history of threatening people on record (Wisconsin Examiner), and formal complaints filed against him by his own peers — was still made president of the Wisconsin Wildlife Federation. Not despite his record. Alongside it.

This is not a bug in the system. This is the system.

Nine Months of Silence

For nine months after Cody Roberts was charged with felony animal cruelty for torturing a wolf in Wyoming — dragging it behind a snowmobile, parading it through a bar, laughing about it on video — not one major hunting organization said a single word.

• National Wildlife Federation
• Wisconsin Wildlife Federation
• Bear Hunters Association
• Safari Club International
• Sportsman’s Alliance
• Hunter Nation
• Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation
• Foundation for Wildlife Management
• Howl for Wildlife

Roberts just pleaded guilty. Just like Quaintance got caught and was fined. Just like Ted Nugent — a documented poacher — remains platformed and celebrated in these same circles.

Ask yourself: where is the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation when a wolf is poached? They are all over elk poaching. Statements, rewards, demands for accountability — when an elk is taken illegally, they show up. But wolves? Cougars? Silence. And here is what makes that silence even more hypocritical: wolves regulate elk herds. Healthy wolf populations produce healthier, more sustainable elk populations. If these organizations actually cared about the game species they claim to protect, they would defend the predators that keep those ecosystems functioning.

They don’t. Because conservation was never the point. The point is killing. And if the thrill of killing is your primary motivation — if the kill itself is the goal rather than any ecosystem value or fair chase ethic — then the law is just an obstacle. You will poach. You have poached. You will do it again. And you will do it on Christmas morning when you think no one is watching.

Wisconsin’s Poaching Crisis Is Bigger Than Quaintance

In March 2025, Wisconsin farmer Dominick Stanek of Viola was sentenced to four months in jail, fined $27,416, and stripped of hunting privileges for 42 years after investigators documented that he had “made a game” of killing over 150 deer from 2020 through 2021.

Stanek’s method was deliberate and sadistic: he shot deer specifically so they would run off and die in the woods where wardens couldn’t find the carcasses. He also placed poison — grape soda mixed with fly-kill pellets — in his cornfields, killing opossums and raccoons and threatening any predatory birds that might eat the poisoned animals.

DNR warden Kirk Konichek said he had never seen “a guilty party show such a complete lack of remorse.” It was the longest and most complex investigation of his career — requiring two years, multiple wardens, surveillance teams, search warrants, and tips from neighbors who had