Indiana’s first drone deer hunting conviction sets legal precedent
By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill
As hunters find new ways to employ drones as tools to help them improve their success in bagging prized trophy animals, state lawmakers and regulators are moving forward with enacting and enforcing new rules to ensure that UAVs are not used to unfairly tip the odds in the sportsmen’s favor.
The state of Indiana recently successfully prosecuted two hunters who used a drone for weeks to illegally track the movements of a prize 17-point buck in the southern part of the state, before harvesting the animal on the second day of the hunting season.
The case represented the first time deer hunters had been prosecuted under a 2024 law, that amended state regulations for the use of UAVs in hunting. Under the statute, a hunter cannot utilize a drone to search for or pursue an animal 14 days prior to that opening day of hunting season for that species, through the last day of the season.
In an interview, Indiana Conservation Officer Josh Thomas, who investigated the case, said the law is similar to other regulations meant to ensure fair hunting practices.
The use of UAVs in this manner, “really goes against the fair chase principles that we try to abide by,” he said. “I hope we treat this just the same as somebody spotlighting a deer at night or poaching with bait.”
Thomas said his investigation began in the small rural town of Madison where a number of deer were regularly seen roaming near the city. The largest prize animal was even given a name, the Nucor Monarch, so-called because it was frequently spotted in the woods and open prairies near Madison’s Nucor steel fabrication facility.
“These deer were basically residing there and being seen by everyone because they were so close to town. They were within one or two miles from being smack-dab in the middle of the town of Madison,” he said.
Thomas began keeping an eye on the herd, thinking that the animals presented a tempting target for illegal poaching, such as shooting from the roadway or shooting at night using a spotlight to blind the animals and cause them to freeze in place.
During his observations, he encountered a group of young hunters, who were intently using conventional means to observe the animals’ movements in the weeks leading up to the opening of deer season last fall.
“Before work, they were getting up on top of their roof with a spotting scope to spot the deer known as the Nucor Monarch,” he said. “We’re talking 3:00, 4:00, 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning, before the sun’s up, they started noticing a drone in about the same location, coming up and then skirting all the properties where this (deer’s) travel is typical.”
The hunting season started on October 1, 2025 and by the next day, two men, one of whom had been identified as the drone’s owner, bagged the Nucor Monarch. Thomas said on October 2 he took his investigation to prosecutors and a judge issued a search warrant calling for the examination of the drone and its controller.
“We took that to what we call a high-tech crime lab and had the flight logs pulled,” he said. “They showed everywhere that the drone had been, which was pretty damning for the suspects.”
The flight logs revealed that the suspects had begun using the UAV to track the locations and movements of the prize buck, starting on September 14.
“That drone had flown every single day and sometimes up to seven times a day. From there we interviewed the suspects to an extent. They didn’t have much to say after that,” Thomas said. “The reality is that the controller and that drone made the case.”
One of the suspects, who was believed to have had a lesser culpability in the case, took a pretrial diversion and was placed on probation. In February, the owner of the drone, who also had killed the deer, took a plea deal and was sentenced to 60 days probation and having his hunting and fishing license revoked for a year.
In addition, he was assessed court fees and fines and a $500 replacement fee for the animal he had illegally hunted. The suspects also were compelled to surrender the deer’s hide and antlers, which are expected to be displayed by the Indiana Department of Natural Resources as part of a “Turn in the Poachers” traveling trailer.
Thomas said the case exemplifies the state’s efforts to balance the rights of hunters to legitimately use drones in the sport, while upholding the rules of fair chase. For example, the law under which the hunters were prosecuted also permits the use of a drone to track a wounded animal that has wandered away from the hunter’s sight to die in an unknown location.
“But that’s where things get somewhat tricky, when you end up flying this drone to look for a deer to recover it, and the deer’s still alive. At that point you have to back out. So, the difference is recovering versus pursuing any game,” Thomas said.
He predicted that cases involving the unfair use of drones in hunting will only increase, as the adoption of unmanned technology becomes more common among sportsmen.
“As soon as this case was made, I think my district alone had received something like a dozen tips that some guy’s flying a drone over his hunting property,” Thomas said. “If I own a 100-acre farm, that drone can tell me how many deer and which deer are on my property at any given time, especially with FLIR thermal imaging.”
Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.
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