No amount of education or enlightenment will make a difference! EVERYONE knows not to litter! EVERYONE! However, the lazy, dirty ***** who do litter don't give a rat's rear end about our environment. There are people who come across as the nicest, most genuine folks you'll ever meet. Put them outdoors trying to get a deer or catch fish and they become total and complete ******. Poachers, litterers, drunken drivers; these people do it all. It's disgusting.
A Selkirk officer checked some anglers in a shelter today. There were Corona beer caps on the ice inside the shelter. No Corona bottles anywhere. They yahoos had pushed the bottles down the holes.
How about cigarette butts? How many smokers put their cig butts in containers and take them off the ice when they're done fishing? Some do but not many.
With respect to ticketing litters, I've mentioned many times. Littering is a very difficult charge to lay against an individual simply because items are not littering until or unless officers can prove that whoever placed the item on the ground or ice, is intending to leave the item. A pile of garbage on the ice beside an angler until that angler packs and leaves without picking up his garbage. That pile can stay in that place for hours. Officers are very seldom able to keep a person or area under surveillance for hours on end. Something usually happens that results in the officer having to abandon surveillance and attend to a complaint or other issue.
