Oregon's Most Radical Ballot Measure in Decades Has Every Politician in the State Running for Cover
It doesn't happen often in American politics — a single ballot measure that drives a progressive Democratic governor and her Republican opponents into the same rhetorical foxhole. But that's exactly what Oregon's Initiative Petition 28, better known as the PEACE Act, has managed to accomplish heading into the November 2026 general election. A measure so sweeping in its scope that even its own supporters openly concede it has no chance of passing, IP28 has nonetheless bulldozed its way toward the ballot, gathering enough signatures to force a statewide vote — and leaving virtually every elected official in Oregon scrambling to put daylight between themselves and it.
The implications extend far beyond Oregon's borders. If IP28 reaches voters and generates serious debate, it could serve as a template — or a cautionary tale — for animal rights activists in other states. For hunters, anglers, ranchers, commercial fishermen, and the rural communities that depend on all of them, this is a fight that matters regardless of your zip code.
What IP28 Actually Does — And Why the Language Matters
Oregon Initiative Petition 28 — officially titled the PEACE Act (People for Elimination of Animal Cruelty Exemptions) — would eliminate the legal exemptions that currently protect hunting, fishing, trapping, and farming from Oregon's animal abuse statutes (ORS 167.315–167.333). That distinction is critical and frequently lost in the debate. Oregon already has animal cruelty laws on the books. What IP28 does is tear out the section of those statutes that carves out space for regulated, lawful activities — effectively reclassifying everything from a deer harvest to a crab boat haul as criminal animal abuse.
Activities such as lawful hunting, fishing, wildlife management, scientific or agricultural research, pest control, and slaughtering livestock are currently exempt from animal cruelty laws. Initiative Petition 28 aims to remove those exemptions. The certified ballot title — the official description that voters would actually see — leaves little ambiguity. It clearly states that the measure "criminalizes breeding practices, injuring/killing animals, including for food, hunting, fishing."
Supporters of IP28 frame it as a natural extension of protections already afforded to companion animals. If it qualifies, Initiative Petition 28 would expand animal cruelty protections in Oregon by effectively giving "all" animals the same protections currently in place for dogs and cats, supporters say. The campaign's own website is disarmingly transparent about the goal. "The reason we are seeking to prohibit these activities is not to be punitive towards anyone currently involved with the injuring, killing, or breeding of animals, but rather to be protective of the needs of the animals and to codify their right to life and bodily autonomy in law," the petition campaign website reads.
The Full Scope of What Would Be Criminalized
The ballot initiative seeks to outlaw all forms of hunting, fishing, and trapping, as well as the slaughter of livestock and poultry, rodeos, animal breeding practices, animal use for medical research, and more. The breadth of that list is what separates IP28 from the kind of targeted animal welfare legislation that enjoys genuine bipartisan support. This isn't a bill to crack down on puppy mills or strengthen penalties for dogfighting. It is a wholesale legal restructuring that would make Oregon, in the words of one farm group, a sanctuary state for every vertebrate animal on its soil.
IP28 would ban causing the death of nearly any animal, regardless of how "cruel" or humane the killing is and regardless of whether the death happened due to hunting, fishing, or farming. Exceptions exist for veterinary care and self-defense. An "animal" is defined by both current and proposed legislation as "any nonhuman mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian or fish." Invertebrates, notably, would be excluded — so swatting a mosquito stays legal. Nearly everything else does not.
Fishing and hunting would be illegal and criminal, and that would apply to longstanding agreements with Indian tribes in the state: "There would not be a cultural or religious exemption for injuring, killing, or sexually violating an animal." That last point — the absence of any tribal exemption — has drawn some of the sharpest and most pointed criticism, cutting across the political lines that normally define these culture-war skirmishes.
How IP28 Got Here: A Three-Cycle Campaign That Refuses to Quit
IP28 is the third iteration of an initiative first introduced by animal rights advocates in 2020. Each version carries the same core goal: eliminate Oregon's statutory exemptions for hunting, fishing, trapping, and farming from animal abuse law. The first version, IP13, failed to make the ballot in 2022. Organizers refiled it as IP3 for the 2024 cycle, and it fell short again. Within days of that second failure, they immediately pivoted and reintroduced the measure in its current form as IP28 — same language, same ambition, new petition clock.
This time, the signature drive succeeded where the previous two had not. The group surpassed the required 117,000 signatures needed to qualify for the ballot, submitting more than 126,000 signatures to the Oregon Secretary of State's Office. The office must verify those signatures using statistical sampling procedures before the petition can officially make it to the November ballot. Given the buffer between signatures submitted and signatures required, the expectation among both supporters and opponents is that IP28 will land on the November 3, 2026 ballot.
The initiative is backed primarily by out-of-state animal rights organizations and has faced consistent, broad-based opposition from Oregon's hunting, fishing, farming, and tribal communities across every cycle. Oregon Hunters Association has directly named out-of-state activist money as a driving force behind the signature collection effort. That framing — outside agitators flooding a rural state with urban ideology — has become central to the opposition's messaging strategy.
The Supporters' Own Admission
Perhaps the most unusual feature of the IP28 campaign is the degree to which its own leadership acknowledges that it won't win. While many posts on social media raised alarm about the proposal's impact on people's hobbies and livelihoods, backers of IP28 have repeatedly said they don't expect the legislation to pass. Campaign spokesperson David Michelson has been explicit on that point: "For our campaign, what a win looks like is so different than what some other campaigns would call a win because we know that this isn't going to pass in 2026. But we still feel like we're winning when we're having those conversations," Michelson said.
That transparency is politically unusual, but strategically coherent. For radical animal rights organizations, the goal of getting IP28 on the ballot is not to change the law in November — it's to normalize the conversation, build donor lists, develop grassroots infrastructure, and force politicians to take uncomfortable public positions. Whether that long-game strategy will generate cultural momentum or simply produce a landslide defeat that sets back the movement is an open question.
The Politicians: A Rare Moment of Bipartisan Agreement
If there is a silver lining to IP28 for Oregon's political class, it's that the measure has delivered something almost unheard of in 2026 American politics: a genuine moment of bipartisan consensus. Oregon's Democratic and Republican leaders are united in their opposition to IP28. So is the governor, who calls it "wrong for Oregon."
Oregon's elected leaders, including Democrats, are not waiting for the Secretary of State's final tally before making clear where they stand on IP28. With Republican lawmakers already aligned in their opposition, there is not one prominent Oregon politician who has expressed their support for such a drastic measure. That unanimity is a telling indicator of just how far outside the political mainstream this measure sits, even in a blue state where environmental and animal welfare causes typically command significant support.
Governor Kotek Draws the Line
Democratic Governor Tina Kotek — a progressive by any reasonable measure — has been unambiguous in her opposition. "Banning hunting, fishing, and basic animal husbandry would kill thousands of jobs and threaten our food supply at a time when we can least afford it," Drazan said in a post to X. Kotek, however, also opposes the petition. "I know tribal leaders, family farmers and ranchers and Oregonians across the state who care deeply about protecting our land, waters and wildlife," Kotek said in a campaign video. Her full statement went further, noting that the petition "risks criminalizing common agricultural practices that are critical to Oregon's economy."
For Kotek, opposing IP28 isn't a departure from her values — it's a recognition that sustaining Oregon's rural economy and honoring the state's tribal relationships are themselves progressive commitments. That's a line of argument that may prove useful to Democrats trying to hold rural seats in a competitive November cycle.
Republican Opposition — And the Political Temptation
On the Republican side, the opposition has been equally fierce, though the framing carries a sharper partisan edge. Christine Drazan, a Republican state senator from Canby, called the petition an attack by Gov. Tina Kotek's allies against the state economy. "Banning hunting, fishing, and basic animal husbandry would kill thousands of jobs and threaten our food supply at a time when we can least afford it," Drazan said in a post to X. Drazan, who is also running for governor, has worked to tie the measure to Kotek despite the governor's own stated opposition — a sign that whatever the policy merits, the political maneuvering around IP28 has already begun in earnest.
The Senate co-chairs of the Oregon Legislative Sportsmen's Caucus, Senators David Brock Smith (R-Port Orford) and Anthony Broadman (D-Bend), are opposed to IP28 for obvious reasons, as the criminalization of hunting and fishing (and the subsequent loss of license revenue) would cripple the state's ability to manage and conserve its wildlife. Their joint opposition is notable given that the caucus spans the aisle, and their shared statement demonstrates that the objection here is fundamentally practical, not merely ideological.
Senator Broadman put the economic argument in stark terms: "Buying locally raised foods at the local farmers market would be outlawed, while restaurant and grocery prices would increase substantially due to the need to ship meat and dairy products in from out of state," Broadman said in a public statement in February. "[This] would create incredible negative impacts to Oregon's statewide economy, causing increasing tax pressure and reduced state services for all Oregonians."
The Economic Stakes: Numbers That Can't Be Dismissed
The political unanimity of opposition makes more sense when you stack up the economic numbers at risk. Criminalizing those practices would have significant repercussions on key industries such as Oregon's beef industry, which brought in $127 million worth in exports in 2023, the fishing industry, which generated $517 million in household income and supported 10,300 jobs in 2025, and for research at public universities that bring in billions across the state.
The Oregon Hunters Association is highlighting the potential impact IP28 would have on the state's 330,000-plus licensed hunters and 500,000-plus licensed anglers, as well as the fact that hunting and fishing currently generate an estimated $1.9 billion annually in economic activity within the state. Those aren't abstract figures. They represent gear shops, guide services, processing facilities, rural motels, fuel stops, and the thousands of small businesses that depend on sportsmen and women spending money in Oregon's rivers, forests, and coastline.
OHA's Executive Director Todd Adkins says a referendum to cancel all hunting and fishing in the state would cripple the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, which relies on dollars generated by hunting and fishing license fees as well as federal excise taxes on guns, ammo, and other sporting goods items. "I'm not even sure we can project or estimate the hit that Pittman-Robertson would take," he says. "The agency's budget for wildlife management would just be gone instantly." The ban would extend well beyond recreational hunting and fishing to commercial fishing and crabbing on the Oregon coast.
What Happens to Wildlife Conservation
ODFW's $180 million-plus annual budget funds habitat restoration, species recovery, hatchery programs, and public lands access across Oregon. Without hunting and fishing revenue, these programs — and the wildlife they protect — would be defunded. This is the deepest irony of IP28: a measure designed to protect animals would likely devastate the very funding infrastructure that currently keeps Oregon's wildlife populations healthy and its ecosystems intact.
Sportsmen and women contribute directly to wildlife restoration, habitat restoration, public access, hunter education, and shooting range development through license fees, tags, permits, and Pittman-Robertson excise taxes paid by firearm, ammunition, and archery equipment manufacturers. This "user pays" model is the most successful wildlife conservation system in the world. Strip that model out of Oregon, and the state's fish and game agency doesn't just shrink — it faces collapse.
The Oregon Farm Bureau issued perhaps the most blunt assessment of what passage would mean for the state's food system: Oregon Farm Bureau said: "The passage of IP 28 would effectively turn Oregon into a 'no kill or harm' sanctuary state, eliminating in-state meat, dairy, and animal protein production. Oregonians would be forced either into a vegan lifestyle or to rely on food shipped in from other states or countries." This would increase food costs for families, undermine local food security, and make Oregon dependent on the national and global food supply chain.
The Tribal Dimension: A Legal Minefield
One of the most legally fraught aspects of IP28 — and one that has not received nearly enough attention in broader coverage — is what it would mean for Oregon's nine federally recognized tribes. If passed, the referendum would open more than 330,000 licensed hunters and 500,000 anglers to criminal liability. It would also jeopardize the treaty-protected hunting and fishing rights of nine sovereign tribes.
Treaty rights predate Oregon statehood and are enshrined in federal law. State ballot measures do not supersede federal treaty obligations. But even if IP28 could not ultimately extinguish tribal treaty rights in court, the measure's passage would create years of expensive legal conflict and enormous practical uncertainty for tribal members whose hunting and fishing practices are not merely recreational — they are ceremonial, nutritional, and cultural.
Oregon Tribes are not exempted — treaty-protected hunting and fishing rights would be jeopardized. That the measure's drafters included no tribal carve-out, despite the obvious legal and moral complications, has struck many observers across the political spectrum as either a serious oversight or a deliberate provocation.
The National Conservation Community Weighs In
IP28 has not gone unnoticed outside Oregon. National conservation groups such as the National Wild Turkey Federation, Ducks Unlimited, and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership have also come out publicly against the state initiative — and the potential that it could lead to similar copycat efforts elsewhere. "Beyond individual impacts, IP-28 poses a direct threat to the North American Model of Wildlife Management, a proven framework that has guided successful conservation efforts in the United States for over a century," wrote a spokesperson for the Congressional Sportsmen's Foundation.
The North American Model of Wildlife Management — the system under which wildlife is held in public trust, managed by science-based agencies, and funded by the users who pursue it — is one of the genuine conservation success stories of the 20th century. It has brought species back from the edge of extinction and sustained healthy populations of game animals across the continent. Any state-level initiative that directly attacks its funding mechanism isn't just a local story. It's a threat to a continental framework that every hunter and angler on this side of the border depends on.
Sportsmen's Alliance Vice President Brian Lynn didn't mince words when he spoke with Outdoor Life earlier this year: "It wouldn't just destroy hunting and fishing, it would destroy any and all uses and interactions with animals, wild or domestic," Lynn said. "In no way, shape, or form does it make any logical sense on any level to anyone with half a brain."
The Broader Coalition: Who's Fighting Back
Major industry groups such as the Oregon Farm Bureau, the Oregon Hunters Association, the Sportsmen's Alliance, and the Oregon Cattlemen's Association all have expressed strong opposition to the petition. That coalition represents a cross-section of Oregon's rural economy that rarely acts in lockstep — beef producers and bass fishermen don't always share political priorities — but IP28 has unified them around a common defense.
A broad coalition of conservation and special interest groups — from the Oregon Farm Bureau and the Oregon Cattlemen's Association to Ducks Unlimited and Backcountry Hunters and Anglers — has come out against it. The Oregon Sportsmen Legislative Caucus, made up of Democrats and Republicans in the Oregon State Senate, has also issued a joint statement opposing IP28, calling it an attack on the state's rural economy and cultural heritage.
The Oregon Hunters Association has been at the center of organizing the financial and messaging response. "It's a remarkable example of extremism," OHA Executive Director Todd Adkins says. "This is what animal extremism looks like if it's left unchecked." Adkins, who spent three years fighting hunting and fishing threats nationally before taking the OHA job, views IP28 through the lens of a national pattern — one where radical proposals are used not to win elections, but to shift the Overton window on animal rights over the long term.
What Happens If It Passes — And Why That's Unlikely
The near-universal political opposition, combined with the campaign's own acknowledgment that passage isn't the goal, makes an IP28 victory in November a remote prospect. Oregon, despite its progressive reputation in major metros, has a significant population of hunters, anglers, ranchers, and rural residents who would vote against the measure in overwhelming numbers. And urban voters who might be sympathetic to the general concept of animal welfare are likely to balk when they understand that IP28 would also criminalize the chicken farm that supplies their grocery store and the university lab that helps develop cancer treatments.
If it passes and is not reversed in court, look for other states to follow suit and for food prices and insecurity to grow, all for no net reduction in animal cruelty. The legal challenges that would follow passage — from tribal rights claims alone, not to mention commerce clause and preemption arguments — would tie Oregon courts up for years.
The tens of thousands of deer and elk harvested by hunters in Oregon each year will all still die, just by other means. Unless Oregon is committed to reintroducing wolves and brown bears to the Willamette Valley, many will die from vehicular collisions, disease, or starvation. Animals are certainly "sentient" in some sense, but until we can reliably communicate with them, we should assume that, like humans, most would prefer a well-placed bullet or arrow over being torn apart by wolves, getting clipped by a minivan and dying in the ditch two hours later, or not having enough food to make it through winter.
What It Means for Hunters and Anglers Beyond Oregon
The outcome of IP28's ballot qualification — and the November vote itself — matters for anyone who spends time in the field or on the water, regardless of what state they live in. Oregon would be the first state in the country to put a total hunting and fishing ban before voters in this form. A defeat for the measure is the expected outcome, but the margin of defeat matters. A close loss emboldens future campaigns. A blowout sends a message that this approach has no constituency even in a left-leaning western state.
IP28 amends Chapter 167 of the Oregon Revised Statutes by removing or narrowing exemptions that currently protect lawful hunting, fishing, trapping, livestock husbandry, commercial meat production, lawful research, wildlife management and other accepted practices. It reclassifies responsible and regulated activities as criminal animal abuse, neglect, or assault. That legal mechanism — targeting exemptions in existing statutes rather than attempting to write new prohibitions — is a clever legislative approach that could be replicated in other states with similar animal abuse code structures. If it gains traction in Oregon, expect to see versions of it appear on ballots in California, Colorado, and Washington within the decade.
For now, the immediate task for Oregon's hunting and angling community is clear: get organized, get loud, and make sure every voter in the state understands what IP28 actually says before they pull the lever in November. The signatures are in. The politicians have all run for cover. The fight has moved to the ballot box — and this time, there's no ducking it.
