Poaching began as a clash over who owned the right to hunt
For much of history a poacher was a hungry peasant taking game the nobility claimed for itself. Under William the Conqueror's forest laws, a commoner hunting in a royal forest could hang. Yet folk heroes from Robin Hood to Bavaria's bold poachers made the crime something close to a rebellion.
The word itself comes from Middle English pocchen, meaning to put in a bag, a cousin of pouch. Early Germanic custom let any free man hunt on common land, while Roman law reserved hunting for rulers, and medieval lords from kings downward tried to keep the forests for themselves. In England, the Norman forest law ran outside the common law, and a poem in the Peterborough Chronicle from 1087 records English anger at it. Popular sympathy never went away: a French writer, Guillaume Budé, recorded the saying that nobody should ask where the venison came from.
In the German-speaking lands, poaching became tangled with politics. When rifles got cheaper in the late 18th century, peasants and servants could poach far more easily, defying the aristocracy's theatrical hunts. Bavaria saw poaching and related deaths rise between 1830 and 1848, and after an 1849 law restricted hunting to those who could pay fees, soldiers were sent to occupy restless frontier villages near Austria. Figures such as Georg Jennerwein became legends, and poaching seeped into Schubert songs and the opera Der Freischütz.
Today the word covers any illegal taking of wildlife, and since the 1980s of wild plants too. Conservationists count it among the gravest threats to species survival. In the US it includes hunting out of season, using poison or explosives, shooting from vehicles, or dazzling animals with spotlights at night. Critics such as Stephen Corry of Survival International argue the label is also used to criminalise indigenous hunters on ancestral lands turned into game reserves, as with Kalahari bushmen.
Motives are often mundane. Interviews with 41 poachers in Louisiana's Atchafalaya basin found 37 hunted mainly to feed their families, and in rural Africa lack of jobs and the high city price of bushmeat drive much of the trade.
Source: Poaching
