back to Legislative Assistance Home The PA Story   In PA the game laws are changed in the State Legislative which is composed of the House and Senate. The game laws are implemented and enforced by the 8 member Game Commission which is appointed by the Governor. Even thought the legislature creates the laws, the politics in PA basically requires that before the Legislature would realistically consider making a change, the Game Commission had to support it. Although I had lived and hunted my whole life in PA, when I first got involved with trying to legalize blood tracking in PA I had no knowledge or experience with the inner workings and politics of the State Legislature or Game Commission. The first step was to figure out how the whole thing "worked". After attending a few Game Commission public meetings and consulting with the major Sportsmen's organizations I started to get a better feel for the process and developed a strategy to get the Game Commission on board. I also started a simple web based organization, called Deer Recovery in PA who's sole purpose was to advance the cause of legalization in PA. Let me warn you, the wheels of change can sometimes be slow in any state but nowhere do things change slower than in PA. With almost one million deer hunters in the state and the state in the midst of major changes to its deer hunting regulations, no one at the Game Commission or in the State Legislature was looking to "fix" something that "wasn't broke" for the last 100 years.   After two and a half years of lobbying the Game Commission, finally in June of 2004 we were able to get their support. Now it was on to the Game and Fisheries Committee in the State House of Representatives. The Game and Fisheries Committee is the gatekeeper for all hunting related legislation coming to the House. Unfortunately we gained the Game Commission's support too late in the Legislative year and our bill died in committee without any action being taken. That ended up being a good thing in the long run since the new bill, HB420, introduced in the spring of 2005 was able to garner several key sponsors, namely the Chairman of the Game and Fisheries Committee. Even with good sponsors it took quite a lot of politicking, which by then I had been educated on, to get the bill out of the committee and to the floor of the House for a vote. One of the key turning points was when I was able to get in front of the Committee in person. Presented with the obvious facts in a face to face venue, it is hard for any reasonable person to be against leashed Blood Tracking. Shortly after my committee presentation, HB420 was resoundingly passed by the State House of Representatives in June of 2006 and passed over to the Senate where it awaits action this September when the Senate re-convenes after the summer break. If all goes as planned, HB420 will roll quickly through the Senate this fall and be enacted into law by the end of 2006. Andy Bensing