Ted Nugent enters plea agreement in illegal bear killing

If trouble comes in threes, then right-wing singer Ted Nugent's recent problems may have begun a week ago, when he entered a plea agreement in the illegal killing of an Alaskan black bear.

Last weekend, Nugent attracted the attention of the Secret Service after he told a National Rifle Association audience that "if Barack Obama becomes the president in November again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.”

On Thursday, it was reported that Nugent's incendiary remarks had caused him to be dropped from the lineup of a concert to be held at Fort Knox this June. Nugent had been scheduled to be the opening act at the annual event, but because Fort Knox is a military installation, officials there decided that his "disparaging remarks made against the commander in chief” had created "a conflict of interest since the military has the obligation to be apolitical.”

Now it has been revealed that on April 14, Nugent admitted to violating what his lawyer called "some crazy law" in Alaska when he shot a bear while filming a bow-hunting episode of his TV show, Ted Nugent Spirit of the Wild, in May 2009.

As explained by the Anchorage Daily News, Nugent's apparently inadvertent violation of the law began when he shot at one bear that was grazed by his arrow but got away, and then shot and killed another four days later. Under a recent law, wounding the first animal counted as "taking," which meant that killing the second put him over his limit.

That in turn meant that when Nugent transported the bear's body out of the Tongass National Forest, he was committing a misdemeanor violation of the Lacey Act, which prohibits the transport of illegally harvested wildlife. And after all of this was shown on his TV program, federal prosecutors swung into action.

Nugent will now be required to pay a $10,000 fine and film a public service announcement about responsible hunting to run regularly on his show. He will also be placed on two years probation and be banned from hunting or fishing either in Alaska or on any U.S. Forest Service land for the next year.

Something like that could certainly make a man cranky enough to start saying "disparaging" things about the president of the United States.

Photo by Jan Kjellin via Flickr