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Friend —
Hunter Nation has three public faces.
Donald Trump Jr. flew to Utah in May 2018 to launch Hunter Nation. On that exact trip, his hunting guide Wade Lemon illegally baited a bear with “a pile of grain, oil, and pastries” — under a trail camera marked with Lemon’s own initials and phone number. Don Jr. shot the bear. Lemon was charged with felony poaching. A year later, Don Jr. handed Lemon a “Modern Day Teddy Roosevelt Award” for “preserving our hunting heritage.” Lemon has since pleaded guilty in federal court for staging fake “canned” mountain lion hunts. Don Jr. is also currently under criminal complaint in Italy for allegedly shooting a protected duck in the Venice lagoon, and has prior scandals over an elephant in Zimbabwe, an endangered sheep in Mongolia, and pregnant prairie dogs in Montana.
Ted Nugent has two poaching convictions, both filmed on his own TV show. California, 2010: illegally baited and killed an underage spike buck, $1,750 fine, originally charged with 11 counts. Alaska, 2012: illegally killed a black bear, $10,000 fine, two years’ probation, hunting ban. In 2014 he stood on a stage in Oshkosh, Wisconsin and openly told the crowd he wanted zero wolves in this state — and what he thought ought to be done about it.
Brett Favre, by his own former teammate’s account, trespassed on private land as a kid, shot a deer with an undersized .22, then held the wounded animal underwater in a puddle until — in his teammate’s words — the bubbles stopped coming out of its nose.
These are the three loudest voices lecturing Wisconsin about “heritage rights” and “fair chase” and “hunter ethics.”
These are the people the Wisconsin DNR is afraid to cross.
And where were they when it really mattered?
In February 2024, Cody Roberts ran down a young wolf with a snowmobile in Sublette County, Wyoming. He taped her jaws shut. He brought her into the Green River Bar in Daniel and paraded her — alive, suffering, muzzled — in front of the patrons for hours. He posed for photos. He kissed her on the head. He took her out back and killed her. His initial fine was $250.
The story sparked global outrage. Two weeks ago — two years after the fact, after a grand jury indictment and a felony plea — Roberts was sentenced to 18 months probation and a $1,000 fine. No prison.
So where were Hunter Nation, Ted Nugent, Donald Trump Jr., Brett Favre, and the entire “ethical hunting heritage” lobby for two years while the world begged for accountability?
Silent.
Not one statement. Not one condemnation. Not one podcast. Not one tweet about the “ethics of fair chase” they love to lecture us about. The same men who scream about a “wolf invasion” couldn’t find their voice when one of their own taped a wolf’s mouth shut for entertainment.
That’s the tell. That’s always the tell. Their “heritage” only cares about hunters’ rights to kill. Never about the animals. Never about cruelty. Never about ethics — except as a rhetorical weapon to shame the people demanding accountability.
Meanwhile — we’re the ones being called “emotional.”
Chris Vaughn from Hunter Nation just went on another podcast warning that hunters’ rights are the “last line of defense” against Wisconsin wolves. The same Chris Vaughn whose own published article on coyotes acknowledges compensatory reproduction — the exact biological reality he denied under oath at the Natural Resources Board.
We are asking for democracy. Transparency. Accountability. That’s it. Public hearings on a citizen petition. An end to wildlife killing contests. A DNR that answers to Wisconsin instead of to a hunting-celebrity industrial complex with a felony record.
And they are furious. Let them be.
Why we don’t flinch.
In Idaho — the model Hunter Nation holds up — a hunter shot three wolf pups in their den last spring. Less than a month old. Some hadn’t opened their eyes. He collected $750 in bounty money for two of them.
That bounty came from the Foundation for Wildlife Management, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit run by Justin Webb. The state of Idaho matches its bounty payments dollar-for-dollar with public license-fee money. Wolves in Idaho’s livestock zones now command up to $2,500 a head.
Where does that nonprofit money go?
Public records obtained from the Idaho Department of Fish and Game show that over a two-year period, the Foundation for Wildlife Management paid $12,000 in bounty money to its own directors and their families — including $4,000 to executive director Justin Webb himself, $5,000 to the vice-president of his board, and $3,000 to the wife, son, and grandson of another board member. In one fiscal year, that self-dealing accounted for nearly 22% of the entire program.
This is what “hunter rights” looks like with no agency oversight: a dead-wolf bounty program, half-funded by the public, that pays its own officers to kill the animals. With the state of Idaho writing the matching check.
It can happen here. Wisconsin’s permanent wolf-hunting rules already include a provision that exists only because hunters complained there was no rule against something they wanted to do. That’s how agencies get captured — one quiet rule change at a time, written by the people we’re supposedly being protected from.
We are people-powered. And right matters.
As much as we hate to keep asking — and we do — we are an all-volunteer, people-powered advocacy organization. No corporate sponsors. No NRA money. No celebrity bounty hunters cutting reimbursement checks to their own families. No cable-TV poachers. No stadium-walkout merch deals.
We are going up against people like this with public records requests, legal filings, rebuttal memos, and 126 organizations representing over 13 million people standing on our December sign-on letter.
And we will win. Because right matters. Because morality matters. Because the truth is on our side, and the receipts are in our hands.
They have a stadium walkout, a podcast, and three spokespeople with documented illegal-hunting histories.
We have a 2021 federal court win that stopped a wolf hunt that killed 218 wolves in 60 hours. We have a state ESA petition the DNR has now ignored for over 300 days — more than triple the legal deadline. We have you.
We are not going away. We are not stopping until killing contests are banned and Wisconsin’s wolves are protected.
Imagine if we could raise the kind of money they raise — to protect wolves instead of kill them.
Idaho’s bounty system has paid out hundreds of thousands of public-private dollars to put dead wolves on the ground. Picture that same engine running in reverse — for monitoring, for litigation, for legislation, for keeping families intact. That’s what every dollar to GLWA does.
We are $260 short of our April goal.
Not $26,000. Not $2,600. Two hundred and sixty dollars. Five people at $50. One person who’s just as fed up as we are.
This is what $1,500 in Idaho bounty money destroys.
Every dollar funds the legal work, the public records requests, the rebuttals to DNR memos, the rulemaking petitions — the people-power infrastructure that has Hunter Nation walking out of stadiums.
Keep them rattled.
For the wolves,
Melissa Smith
Executive Director
Friends of the Wisconsin Wolf & Wildlife
Great Lakes Wildlife Alliance
P.S. Hear it for yourself.
• Ted Nugent on a Wisconsin stage in 2014
• Ted Nugent on the “wolf INVASION”
• Chris Vaughn on “heritage rights”
These are the people demanding to set wildlife policy in our state. Then come back here and chip in $50.
They are afraid of us. Let’s give them a reason to be.
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