Should of got duck shooters instead of deer hunters. They are used to shooting on the fly
watching the news, one of the birds was a chick....
Identify your target. Number 1 rule in hunting. Bloody cowboys!! This makes me sick to the pit of my stomach.
^ Amen to that!
It's must be a form of mental illness when they become so focused on stalking, then killing, that they minimize the 100% certain rule into "I thought it was a deer", or whatever other lame excuse they come up with when the reality sets in.
Hunters shooting hunters(or anyone else) just shouldn't happen.
As with all these types of things these muppets give the good operators a bad name.
Have to disagree. It's a far harder problem to solve than you make it out to be. Though there will be people out there who shoot on 'I think...' I'd say the majority are 'certain' they can see the animal they're looking for, even when they can't.
The problem is that your are working against 100s of thousands of years of evolution. As a predator it is much better to have prey recognition that kicks in on slight evidence - and to wrongly identify something as your target - than it is to miss out on a feed because your mind had only partial information and wasn't sure.
So the natural, human instinct triggers on a faint match to what you are looking for 'there it is ... get it ...', and the adrenalin follows.
The same thing happens with threats. I had one trapline with a log on it that first time I saw it convinced me it was a wolf. Each day after that I'd walk that section of line going 'now Pom, there's a log here that look like a wolf - don't be shocked by it today'... But each day I'd come round that corner and the alarm response would trigger and the adrenalin response would kick in.
So, back to shooters - hunters need to train themselves not to shoot based on 'being certain it's a deer', because as we've seen again and again - they are sure. They actually need to step out of that built-in prey-recognition pattern and force themselves to answer a different question, such as: 'could that be a human?' or in this case 'could that be a takehe?'. And that, with limited time available, is a very hard thing to do.
That doesn't excuse anyone for shooting anything they don't mean to. Using a gun comes with that responsibility. But we will get nowhere accusing people of carelessness/laziness/gung-ho-ness when actually that is not the cause. What is required is teaching/learning/using good techniques for breaking out of that prey recognition pathway .. and we will achieve much more teaching/training hunters to do that than we will by berating people.
remember in recent years we've had one ex branch president of the deer stalkers kill someone and another hunter with decades of experience who was an instructor for firearms licences who killed someone.
the brain is notorious for "filling in the gaps" you are hard wired to make a recogniseable object out of an otherwise unrecogniseable shape, you look at a rock or a cloud and can see a resemblance to an object you recognise.
adrenaline can turn off your normal cautious responses and make you more likely to act impulsively, remember the average burst of adrenaline lasts a few minutes, wait for it to pass and your nerves to settle down, have another look and reassess.
the longer you're out there hunting finding nothing, the more you want to find something, and not 'waste" your time,
finding game is a bonus, it shouldnt be taken as a likely event.
what are hunters wandering around in a lot of the time? fleece... what does the texture of fleece resemble? a lot of animal pelts....
how well do you recognise colour in the bush? the darker it is the worse your colour recognition, high vis orange can end up looking like a faded brown colour in lower light...
can you really make the necessary allowances in your brain for the various conditions that can trick your brain into seeing something other than what you are really looking at? how often do you get to see the entire shape of the animal you might be shooting at if you're in the bush?
Sorry, but I have to disagree with your disagreement :)
This isn't a war where the combatants are defined as being friend or foe, in which the risk of return fire leads to heightened tension and can result in so called "friendly fire"
This is a one sided engagement where the deer are not shooting back.
The hunter is not threatened by the deer, so there is no excuse for pulling the trigger if you cannot identify your target.
There will always be another deer and on another day!
Justifying manslaughter in the situational psychology of a one sided sport is just semantics.
It is manslaughter, just like drunk driving causing death should be manslaughter.
This post has been edited by the author on 22 August 2015 at 11:53.
"It's must be a form of mental illness when they become so focused on stalking, then killing, that they minimize the 100% certain rule into "I thought it was a deer", or whatever other lame excuse they come up with when the reality sets in. "
It does have a name "red mist"
Not treatable but episodes dont last long. Its what can get you up that last hill but also make you cross that uncrossable river. You just dont see the consequences till its too late.
I agree totally with what madpom and wayno are saying above - the brain is remarkably good at fooling itself. If we are honest, we have to acknowledge we've all done it. And that's a worry.
As I indicated above, a good mate of mine worked in pest control for several decades - the kind of professional who puts around 15,000 rounds through his rifle every year. He told me that in all that time he only had one 'close call' and that was a failure to recognise a remote farm house potentially in the zone of fire.
I believe he achieved this remarkable record because he is such a safety oriented person. His attitude is "once you pull that trigger there is NO getting the bullet back". That thought MUST be in your mind every-time the gun is on your shoulder. And in the heat of the moment, this is a big ask for many people.
I've nothing against good, experienced hunters. They have great bush skills most trampers never get - and can be good company in a hut. But sadly there is no short-cut to experience, and some will never be any bloody good. And frankly they give me the cold willies when I encounter them.
Every year there is at least one hunting tragedy, usually hunter on hunter. Which I guess has to be put alongside the fact that plenty of trampers kill themselves as well. But increasingly we are becoming more risk averse as a society, and for trampers and hunters to share the same space will become more of a challenge with time and increasing pressure.
This post has been edited by the author on 22 August 2015 at 12:14.
exercising enough patience in evaluating the target may have aleviated a lot of unecessary deaths.
technically you can argue theres no excuse.
in the real world it just doesnt work out like that in the heat of the moment at times. everyone is different, despite what they've been taught to do with a firearm...
i'm not excusing people being shot. people are making major mistakes they shouldnt, the fact is that they do, and always will
