Greg Richard wants to see a ban on hunting with dogs in Beaufort County.

The Aurora property owner, volunteer firefighter and lifetime hunter addressed the Beaufort County Board of Commissioners at Monday’s regularly scheduled meeting.

Richard brought with him a petition signed by 186 county residents who feel the same about hunting with dogs in the county. He told commissioners more signatures were being collected.

“The main issue, the primary focus, is a safety issue,” Richard said.

He pointed out that during hunting season, many rural roads where hunting clubs have permission to hunt are lined bumper-to-bumper on both sides, leaving motorists to dodge both hunters and their dogs. He reported erratic driving from hunters following dogs through GPS tracking and damage to farmers’ fields by both trucks and dogs.

“When a dog or deer run through (this farmer’s) soybeans, they do a large amount of damage,” Richard said.

Richard said he has dogs running through his property, some even on his porch, six days a week during the hunting season, which also interferes with him hunting his own property.

“You cannot hunt your own property without the constant presence of dogs,” Richard said.

He told of another property owner in the area who has had to fix his fencing 12 separate times because his panicked livestock has broken through to get away from dog packs running through the livestock’s enclosures. Another farmer who lodged a complaint about the practices, received a death threat by mail from someone in a local hunt club, Richard said.

“Are we dealing with decent human beings or are we dealing with thugs? …

They hunt ‘Wherever I want, when I want, however I want,’” Richard said. “There are no laws to protect landowners if someone’s dogs come on their property.”

It is illegal to hunt deer with dogs in more than half of North Carolina’s 100 counties. It is also against the law for property owners to shoot dogs in the course of their hunting.

Most concerning, Richard said, is that some of those hunting with dogs shoot onto private property from the road. He showed pictures of a home’s siding punctured by bullet holes, saying the house had been shot on two separate occasions.

“Hunting from the roadside continues,” Richard said. “You have no business shooting a high-powered rifle at a moving target in a residential area.”

Richard said most of the petition signers were avid hunters like him and are only concerned about safety.

“We do not believe that all dog hunters are bad people, please understand that,” Richard said. “I wish I had another workable solution.”

He did not ask commissioners to ban hunting with dogs, but to let Beaufort County voters decide the issue by adding a referendum to the next election’s ballot. However, the deadline to put a referendum on that ballot has passed, according to commissioners Gary Brinn and Jerry Langley.

Brinn told Richard that he’d received calls from people on both sides of the issue and that it was his understanding that the problems were caused by “a few bad apples.”

“That dog is trespassing on my property. Even though he can’t read, he’s still trespassing,” Richard said — a statement that got a laugh from the large audience.