Dogsport

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Last Saturday morning two young men were headed home after a morning of hunting when one was shot and killed - not by another hunter, or an angry husband, but by a dog who was a passenger in the back seat of their vehicle.  The shooting occurred in a rural area south of Wichita, Kansas, and the victim was a thirty-year-old male who was riding in the front passenger seat.  The shooter was a dog riding in the back seat of the vehicle who apparently stepped on the rifle's trigger causing it to fire through the seat and into the back of the victim.  

I have a good friend who has said on many occasions that deer hunting will never be a "sport" until the deer are armed.  I don't know what this particular pair of hunters were after, but I'm sure that my friend's "humor" could be extrapolated to cover whatever type of game was involved. (Duck hunting will never be a sport until the ducks are armed, for instance.)

But death is not funny and it does not lend itself well to humor.  The dead man was somebody's husband, father, son, brother, lover, or just a good friend, and his loss is being grieved by someone, perhaps many.

In reading about this incident, I quickly found links to several other stories where dogs had accidentally shot humans, something that should be of interest to anyone who hunts with the assistance of a dog. According to a story in the Washington Post in October of 2015,  at least ten people were shot by dogs the United States between the years 2004-2015, and several others are known to have been shot by canines since then.

One of the more famous cases of a man being shot by a dog occurred on December 28, 2018, when Matt Branch, a former football player at LSU, was on a duck-hunting outing with friends near Eagle Lake, Mississippi, when a friend's dog jumped into the bed of a pickup truck being used by the hunting party and stepped on a hunting gun disengaging the safety and tripping the trigger.  Branch was hit in the left thigh in an injury so severe that his leg had to be amputated.

Two months earlier another man who was hunting jackrabbits in New Mexico with three dogs in the cab of his truck was shot and severely injured when one of the dogs stepped onto his shotgun and got his foot in the trigger mechanism - causing the gun to slip off of the backseat and fire as it did so.  The shotgun fired through the back of the front seat striking the driver and causing numerous injuries.

During that same month and year a duck hunter in Iowa was shot as his retriever dog was climbing back into the boat and hit the trigger of the hunter's shotgun with his foot.

And there are other hunting stories in this vein shotgunned across the internet.  Hunters need to act responsibly with their guns as well as with their hunting companions, even if those companions are canine.  Guns should be unloaded except when they are being carried in the actual act of hunting, they should be inaccessible when not in use (in the trunk or a special compartment), and the safety's should be on at any time when game is not being engaged. 

The more those commonsense rules are ignored, the more likely it is that hunting will evolve into a true sport - one in which all parties have a decent shot of winning.