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Ted Nugent fined for failing to kill bear

Probably won't kill Obama either, Secret Service says

Ted Nugent – the hunter, "conservative activist" and rock guitarist whose Marshall amps probably go up to 12 – has been fined for failing to finish off a black bear he wounded with a bow and arrow.

Nugent, 63, winged the creature during a 2009 hunting trip in a US national forest in southeast Alaska for his reality TV show Ted Nugent Spirit of the Wild. However, he failed to track it down and administer the coup de grace, as the law requires.

Alaska allows "an annual bag limit of one black bear per designated geographic area", Reuters explains. Wounded animals count towards the bag, so Nugent was heading straight for court when, four days after wounding the first bear, he killed a second.

The rocker then committed a second breach of environmental protection law – specifically of the Lacey Act – by "transporting his prey by boat out of the national forest".

Nugent pleaded guilty by telephone in the US District Court in Ketchikan, Alaska, yesterday. He was slapped with a $10,000 (£6,200) fine, two years' probabation, and was "forbidden from hunting in Alaska or any US national forest for a year".

He told the court: "I cherish my hunting time and relationships with the people and the wildlife of Alaska. I'm afraid I was blindsided by this, and I sincerely apologise to everyone for it."

As well as falling foul of the Alaskan authorities, Nugent has had a spot of bother with Secret Service agents, who last week asked him to clarify comments he made about Barack Obama at the National Rifle Association convention in St Louis.

He apparently told the assembled NRA faithful he'd be "dead or in jail" if the president secured re-election on 6 November, and said of administration officials: "We need to ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in November."

Spooks hooked up with the outspoken guitar-botherer "to determine if he was a threat to the president", but after what Nugent described as a "solid" meeting, decided no further action was necessary. ®

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