Following safety rules will keep huntingrelated accidents on the decline.
In 2015, Texas’ 1.2 million licensed hunters set records giving the state’s hunting community important goals toward which they can aim as they prepare for the start of 2016 autumn hunting seasons that begin in three weeks.
They can go a long way in reaching those goals — continuing a decadeslong decline in huntingrelated injuries and accidents that this past year saw record-setting lows in hunting-related accidents and fatalities — by paying close attention to where they aim their shotguns and rifles.
“Understanding and following basic safe hunting practices, especially knowing your safe zone of fire and keeping your gun’s muzzle pointed in a safe direction at all times, would prevent a very large percentage of the accidents we see,” said Steve Hall, who heads hunter education programs for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. “Those were the most common causes of hunting-related accidents last year.”
Hitting the mark
The good news — and it’s very good news —is that those types of accidents and all huntingrelated accidents resulting in injury or fatalities are significantly much less common than they were just a couple of decades ago. This past year, Texas hunters set records for the lowest number of huntingrelated accidents in the 50 years since the state began standardized gathering of such data. Texas hunters also set records in 2015 for the lowest rate of fatal accidents and lowest rate of total accidents per 100,000 licensed hunters since standardized record keeping began in 1966.
This past year, Texas saw 20 hunting-related accidents, with two of those proving fatal. That’s the state’s lowest accident total and lowest number of non-fatal accidents in the half-century of compiling accident data.
While the two fatal incidents are not the lowest on record — the number ties with six other calendar years that saw two hunting-related fatalities — they do represent the lowest rate of fatalities (0.17 fatalities per 100,000 hunting licenses) since TPWD began compiling the data.
Also, the overall rate of hunting accidents in 2015 (1.7 per 100,000 hunting licenses) is the lowest on record.
To put the safety of hunting in perspective, the motor vehicle accident fatality rate in Texas is about 13 per 100,000 population. The drowning rate in Texas over a three-year period earlier this decade averaged 1.3 per 100,000.
“Hunting is a very safe activity,” Hall said. “But we can always do some things to make it safer.”
One of those things is focusing on educating hunters about safe hunting practices, raising the profile of safe hunting behaviors and making such behavior almost automatic and subconscious among the state’s million-plus hunters.
Such focus has been the target of hunter education efforts over the past half century, and anecdotal and empirical evidence indicates those efforts have effected a social, cultural and behavioral shift in hunters’ attitudes toward safe hunting behavior.
The numbers speak for themselves.
Over the past 50 years, hunting-related fatalities in Texas, almost all of which involved firearms but often other causes such as falls and other incidents, have declined by more than 80 percent. Over the same period, non-fatal hunting accidents have declined in number by more than half.
Steady decline
Over the 10-year period of 1966-1975, Texas averaged a sobering 23.4 fatal hunting accidents and 61.1 non-fatal incidents involving significant injuries. The state saw as many a 37 fatal hunting-related accidents in a single year, 1968.
Over the past decade, 2006-2015, those numbers had fallen to an average of 3.5 fatalities per year and 23.4 non-fatal incidents.
When gauged by rate of accidents per 100,000 hunters, the decline has been even more impressive. The 1966-75 average was 2.65 fatalities per 100,000 hunters. During 2006-15, it was 0.33 per 100,000 hunters — this, despite the number of licensed hunters doubling between 1966 and 2015. What changed? A lot. Wildlife agencies, private hunter-based organizations and other groups pushed major education/advertising programs aimed at improving safe hunting practices, educating hunters about safe hunting practices as well. In 1972, Texas began a voluntary hunter education program that blended instruction on safe hunting practices with insights on wildlife conservation, hunting ethics and regulations. In its early days, the program, taught by volunteer instructors, annually certified about 10,000 students.
Beginning in 1988, hunter education certification became mandatory for all Texas hunters born on or after Sept. 2, 1971.
Texas hunter education program has certified more than 1.2 million hunters since 1972, and in recent years has annually averaged certifying about 65,000 students, Hall said. Safe hunting practices are crucial parts of the program.
Admittedly, Hall said, it’s tough to come up with empirical evidence that Texas’ mandatory hunter education program played a role in the steep, steady decline in hunting-related accidents. But there’s compelling anecdotal evidence supporting that theory. For example, the number of hunting-related accidents per 100,000 hunters in the years since Texas imposed mandatory hunter education certification is half what it was during the 16 years the program was voluntary.
“You can draw your own conclusions from that,” Hall said.
Accidents remain
While hunting accidents have steeply declined, they haven’t disappeared. And a handful of issues are behind most of those accidents.
In recent years, a high percentage of accidents involved dove hunters. In 2015, 60 percent of the hunters involved in non-fatal accidents were hunting doves. In almost all of those incidents, the victim was struck by pellets fired when another dove hunter swung on a bird and fired without taking into account, or even knowing, the location of other hunters.
“It’s every hunter’s responsibility to know their safe field of fire, and all hunters’ responsibility to let other hunters know where they are,” Hall said.
Also, fatigue can play a role in poor judgment during dove hunts, Hall said. A large percentage of hunting-related accidents occur in late afternoon, after many hunters have been afield for hours. During dove season, add the draining heat and bright sunlight of a September day, and you have the ingredients for poor decision making, Hall said.
(If you are thinking alcohol plays an outsize role in such incidents, you’d be wrong. The stereotype of hunters as booze-swilling louts with guns, dangers to themselves and others, is not supported by the facts. TPWD investigators determined alcohol was a factor in only 10 percent of hunting accidents in 2015, about what recent years have averaged. Today, mixing alcohol and hunting is as socially and culturally taboo among hunters as drinking and driving is among the general public.)
With the Sept. 1 opening of dove season in most of Texas just three weeks away, wingshooters soon will get to put into practice the safe hunting behaviors most have been taught and had reinforced since they first went afield. The value of abiding by those lessons is obvious, as is the hard evidence that Texans are, increasingly taking those messages to heart.