By Jacqueline Ronson
Two Yukoners have been convicted of illegal hunting for the second time this year.
A territorial court judge this week fined Alan Robinson and John Robinson, father and son, $12,600 and $9,600 respectively for violating the terms of their special guide licence and for hunting caribou in an area where they were not permitted to do so.
They have also been banned from hunting for 14 and a half years.
The conviction comes only six months after a conviction for separate but similar offences.
In the first incident, the Robinsons were fined $5,000 each for hunting caribou in a protected area near the Hoole River in September of 2007.
Their ATVs were seized and they were forbidden from hunting for five years, with the condition of also completing a hunter education and ethical development course.
Those charges were laid in 2009, and the Robinsons pleaded guilty to the offences three days into a four-day trial in April of this year.
The conservation officers proved their case by using trophy photos posted online to show the location of the hunt.
In Judge Dennis Schmidt’s decision, he wrote that “there are only 15 conservation officers in the vast area of the Yukon, and the catching of the persons violating the hunting regulation has to be taken extremely seriously to support those few officers in the field.” More....