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Poaching is a crime of laziness.

In that respect it reminds me of nothing so much as littering. In both cases the people responsible fail to meet even the barest standards of decency.

And of course poachers also litter. Their spoor is carcasses rather than candy wrappers or beer cans.

Another commonality between poaching and littering is that both crimes are so utterly unnecessary.

This can be said of all crimes, obviously. Yet I can understand certain offenses, even if I don’t condone them.

A person who steals a TV set because he can’t afford one is of course as equally culpable as a thief who already has a couple of big screens in his living room.

But the one thief has a motivation that is logical, if no less criminal.

The approximate equivalent, when it comes to poachers, is someone who shoots a deer and takes all the meat home because the larder is light and the kids are hungry.

But a recent rash of poachings in Baker County is absent such justification.

In the last week of November, Oregon State Police fish and wildlife troopers investigated three cases, in different locations and involving different species.

On Nov. 27, troopers responded to a report of a wolf shot and killed near the Sparta Road, about 25 miles east of Baker City.

The same day, a hunter found one dead black bear cub just off Forest Road 77 about 3.5 miles northwest of Halfway. OSP troopers found a second cub. Both bears had been shot and left to waste.

Three days later, on Nov. 30, OSP Trooper Dakotah Keys investigated a report of a bighorn sheep ram that had been shot and left to waste near Hibbard Creek, a tributary of the Snake River about 14 miles north of Huntington.

The poacher took the ram’s head — almost certainly for the horns — and left the meat.

In common with people who litter, the poacher or poachers have left a mess. But poachers, in my view, have done more harm. They also have stolen from the public.

All four of those animals, under Oregon law, are public property.

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) manages wolves and bears and bighorn sheep.

It’s a complicated task, to be sure.

Some Oregonians would prefer that wolves, which returned to the state in 1999 by migrating west from Idaho, be eradicated.

Bears and bighorns, by contrast, are game animals — species that some people pay money to apply for permission to hunt. But they’re also wildlife that some Oregonians like to see while out for a drive in the hills.

The poachers took from both groups — the hunters and the sightseers.

Poaching is a crime no matter the motivation. Moreover, ODFW recently killed six wolves from the Black Pines pack, which has roamed in the area where the wolf was killed, due to the pack’s repeated attacks on cattle.

Illegally killing a wolf galvanizes the people and groups that not only support the return of wolves to Oregon but also want the wolf population to grow.

The poaching also makes it less likely that ODFW will allow sport hunting of wolves, as Idaho, Montana and Wyoming do.

Whoever killed the bighorn ram seems to have been the classic wildlife cretin — someone who wanted an unearned and illicit trophy but left dozens of pounds of wholesome meat to rot.

The killing of the ram is particularly noxious because the sheep was part of a herd that’s been struggling the past three years due to a bacterial infection that has pared the herd from around 400 sheep to about 280.

ODFW, which previously sold a few ram hunting tags each year for the Lookout Mountain unit, has canceled hunts the past four years.

The poaching of the two bear cubs is perhaps the most callous of this grim trio.

Although I don’t generally indulge in anthropomorphism, I find it especially repugnant that someone would shoot a couple of what are, in effect, juveniles — a feat of marksmanship comparable to the proverbial fish in a barrel.

Bighorn sheep are hardly elusive, either, especially during the late fall.

The lack of hunting pressure the past few years probably has affected the bighorns’ behavior as well.

I’ve hunted elk in more than a dozen Novembers — after the legal ram hunting season — and some of the sheep were about as wild as cattle, barely deigning to move off the road when a four-wheeler approached.

I hope the poachers are punished.