In return, Ruhr got a deferred sentence on the remaining count of operating without an outfitter registration. Once he completes his outfitter registration application, he'll be able to guide again in Colorado. His registration will then be scrutinized for a year, but if he commits no further violations during that time, the charge against him will disappear.
Mile High Guide Services was never charged with any crime and was recently reissued its outfitter registration after Nagel and Lingbeck paid their restitution.
Jay Bevenour
Loose goose: Ron Ruhr was investigated by the Colorado Division of Wildlife.
Mark A. Manger
Loose goose: Ron Ruhr was investigated by the Colorado Division of Wildlife.
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"It's extortion," says Nagel, who had to borrow money to make the payment. "I take full responsibility for not renewing the registration. Maybe I'm a bad office manager, but should I pay $6,000 for that? What gets me is that we had to pay for Bill Sivils's hunting trip. Did it take him five or six days of hunting to find out that Ron wasn't registered?"
But Schaefer says Ruhr, Lingbeck and Nagel were treated more than fairly. "If I would have filed charges under [the state's] wildlife statutes, Ron would have gotten points against his hunting license, and he would have been prohibited from hunting for several years. After reading through all his records, I didn't see that he was a real threat to wildlife resources, so I filed charges under the Office of Outfitters Registration statutes [which carry lesser penalties].
"We bent over backwards for them to get legal. In a case like this, people usually never outfit again," he adds. "It's a good plea agreement, because we got their attention, but we're not putting them out of business. Ron is really knowledgeable about snow geese. The guy lives and breathes snow geese. I'd hate to see Ron not be able to hunt in Colorado. I had the option of taking that away, and I did not. For a change, I'm not sending someone to jail. It's nice to know that someone who cares about wildlife resources will be back."
Attorney Tom Lamm, who represented Ruhr and Mile High Guide Services, says everyone was at fault for the long, involved investigation. "Ron never should have assumed that $500 makes him an employee, and Andy should have sent in his registration. Nobody is covered in glory in this case," he says. "But my belief is that they were operating in good faith. My opinion is that this got blown out of proportion. If you're a wildlife officer and you're in a game habitat area and you see a truckload of people with loaded guns, you have a pretty good idea that they're bad guys. But if you see a newspaper article with pictures and everything and he's not on your list, it seems to me that instead of going undercover and spending lots of money on an investigation, you'd pick up the phone and say, 'Who are you?'"
"They didn't have to come down on me like I was someone in the Branch Davidians," Ruhr adds. "It's like killing a fly with a sledgehammer. They need the sledgehammer because sometimes there's a raging bull they need to put down.
"But it's not me."
