Under the plea, the 39-year-old country singer agreed to pay a $15,000 fine, give up hunting, fishing and trapping in Minnesota for five years, and forfeit both the bear's hide and the bow he used to shoot the animal in 2004.

The law seems to work in a pretty funny way. Plea bargaining is a distortion when it allows people to walk free on minor charges - in this case they appear to have dropped anything about the killing, and done him for "a misdemeanor charge of falsely registering a captive bear as being killed in the wild".

Meanwhile Lee Marvin Greenly his "hunter guide" who didn't actually do the killing appears likely to come off rather worse:

Greenly faces a maximum prison sentence of five years for each count, forfeiture of all-terrain vehicles he and employees used to reach the bait stations, and a maximum fine of $400,000.

That seems a bit more reasonable.

The right to harm bears...