Deer and People Face Deadly Peril in Hunting Season

The herd must be thinned. The weakest, the slowest, the dumbest must be weeded out. And that is why we hunt.

Unfortunately, however, it is not the weakest, slowest, dumbest deer that are being weeded out.

It appears that it is the weakest, slowest and dumbest hunters who are dropping like flies.

On the opening day of deer-hunting season in Maryland, for instance, 12 hunters were injured, 10 from gunshot wounds and two from falling out of trees.

I am genuinely sorry for all those who were injured, but a fair question might be: How stupid do you have to be to fall out of a tree?

A fair answer might be: pretty stupid. A recently released federal study, however, showed that 50% of all hunting accidents come from hunters falling out of trees.

So another fair question might be: What are these guys doing in trees?

Well, that takes a bit of explaining. You have to understand hunters. Though hunting is called a “sport,” hunters have been known to want a little edge.

Some of these edges can be found in L. L. Bean’s “Hunting Specialties” catalogue. It contains 72 pages of equipment, aides and devices to make sure you are smarter than an animal.

First, there is page after page of camouflaging: camouflage coats, hats, gloves, mittens, vests and gun covers. Then there are all sorts of hunting calls to fool the animal.

And if you don’t want to go to all the trouble of actually blowing through a call, there are tapes that you just snap into a recorder and put out in the forest.

There are decoys and blinds. There are spotting scopes, rifle scopes and shotgun scopes. There are scents, scientifically designed to befuddle animals and make them fall in love with you.

There is even something called an “Electronic Game Counter” for $299. You place it on a trail and it sends out an infrared beam. Every time an animal passes, the time and date are recorded. This way you can sleep late, get up and check the game counter and then camouflage yourself, douse yourself with scent, snap a call into the tape recorder and wait to kill something.

And then there are tree stands. You might think you’d have enough advantage over a deer just standing on the ground with all that equipment. But no, you can always hide in a tree and blast the deer from there. L. L. Bean offers no fewer than nine tree stands.

Is all this fair?

Well, yes. Because even though the deer gets no extra camouflage, no fake scent, no telescopes, no electronic calls, and no heavy armament, it does have one advantage:

No deer has ever fallen out of a tree.

But hunters do it all the time.

Not that we can depend on hunters to hurt only themselves, however. Unfortunately, hunters often take the innocent with them.

A truly ghastly case was written about a few months ago in the New York Times Magazine. The article told the story of Karen Ann Wood. She and her husband, a child psychologist, and their twin children lived in a small suburban subdivision a few miles west of Bangor, Me. Last year, a hunter--he was the produce manager of a local supermarket and a Boy Scout leader--began hunting very close to the subdivision.

Karen Ann Wood went outside her house, possibly to make sure that her children were safe from the hunters in the neighborhood. She was 130 feet from the house and five feet within her own property line when the hunter killed her. She was 37.

The hunter was 189 feet from her and 319 feet from her house. Under Maine law you cannot discharge a firearm within 300 feet of a house.

It was Nov. 15 at 3:30 p.m. The hunter had a .30-06 rifle mounted with a scope. Mrs. Wood was wearing two white mittens. The hunter aimed at them and killed her.

Could you mistake a woman for a deer from only 60 yards away especially if you had a scope on your rifle?

The hunter did. He was arrested and charged with manslaughter. But the grand jury would not indict him. So he went free.

Many locals supported the hunter. Mrs. Wood should not have been wearing white mittens! Didn’t she know that this could look like a deer’s rear end?

And the Bangor Daily News outdoors columnist, Tom Hennessey, wrote that if Mrs. Wood “had been wearing one piece of blaze-orange clothing, she’d be alive today.”

Is that right? Well on Oct. 23 of this year, Betty J. Maynard, 40, was shot to death by a hunter who was standing only 100 feet away from her. Mrs. Maynard was dressed in red and wearing a fluorescent-orange vest.

The hunter said he thought she looked like a deer. And that is why he fired his shotgun into her head.

So if you have to leave your house this hunting season, say to go to work or to save your children, try to be extra-careful.

Wear as many bright colors as you can. Whistle, shout, sing show tunes and loudly quote baseball statistics to prove you are human.

And, please, if you have to pass under a tree, watch out for falling hunters.