When I took my state’s required hunter safety course, one of the instructors was an older dude with grey hair and a ponytail who wouldn’t look out of place at a Dead & Company concert.
To point out the importance of wearing an orange hat during small game seasons, and also to “be sure of your target and what lies beyond it” he pointed out how much that grey hair and ponytail would look a lot like a squirrel if you only caught a glimpse of it through some brush.
Not saying that’s exactly what happened here, the kid doesn’t look like he was the grey ponytail type, but the article shook loose that memory in my head.
EDIT: not that I’m ungrateful, but somehow this is now my highest rated comment on Lemmy, and I’m just curious why this one in particular resonated to well.
Fair, I hadn’t thought of that but it makes sense. My first thought was that it was a very blatant murder cover up. But ive apparently fallen too deep into fiction if that’s what cane to mind first.
Aside from emphasizing the hat, that also seems like an opportunity to emphasize the importance of positively identifying one’s target and backstop. It’s reckless to shoot at something that might be a valid target.
Quickscope lmao /s
Isn’t it true that orange looks green to animals?
What is the hardest color for deer to see?
While deer have no trouble seeing short-wavelength colors like blue and green, their eyes are not well adapted to seeing long-wavelength colors, such as red and orange. This is what makes hunter-orange so useful in the field. Humans see it as a neon alert of another hunter’s presence while deer see it as a muted yellowish-gray that blends in reasonably well in mixed woods.
https://www.fieldandstream.com/stories/hunting/deer-hunting/what-colors-can-deer-see
I’m no expert on animal color vision, but different animals absolutely see color differently, some have markedly worse color vision than humans, others are even better
And of course we can’t really know for certain how different animals perceive color since we can’t actually see the world through their eyes as it gets processed through their brain, though we can make some pretty educated guesses.
AFAIK, most mammals except for some primates (like humans) and a few other exceptions, have dichromatic vision (have only 2 kinds of cone cells in their eyes instead of 3 like we do) so there’s gonna be some “gaps” in their color vision, and one of the common configurations is similar to red-green colorblindness in humans and would make orange look very similar or indistinguishable from green but the specifics do vary from one species to another.
Other types of animals like many fish, birds, and reptiles actually have 4 types of cones and so can see parts of the spectrum we can’t (though it doesn’t necessarily mean they can or can’t see the same colors we do and then some, where we have receptors for red, blue, and green light, they might have for example, red, blue, blue-green, and green, giving them essentially the same range of color vision we do but with extra sensitivity to the blue/green part of the spectrum)
And then of course you have animals like mantis shrimp with 12 or 16 types of receptors.
dies
Interesting word choice.
Yeah it was the craziest thing! Someone shouted, “Hey look, a squirrel” and the poor kid just keeled over.
Why the F do kids shoot squirrels? And who the F confuses a squirrel that fits in a shoe box with room to spare with a human of near-adult size?
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Sadly there’s a certain adorable resemblance
If only he was 1/16th the size, then i would believe the shooters. He probably got hate targeted and got brought out to “hunt”
Murder did occur to me, I watch a lot of detective shows.
But it’s just possible his body was concealed by brush and the back of his hair was seen against the branches.
Of course it would have to be a nearsighted trigger-happy idiot too “alpha male” to wear glasses, (or has a dad who’s not gonna let his son appear weak) but I’m pretty sure the situation self-selected for that.
Dude should have known better than to go hunting with Dick Cheney.
It was actually the fault of the guy who got shot. In the style of bird hunting they were practicing, someone flushes the prey. The shooter, holding their shotgun at low ready, swiftly brings it up and fires. Everyone knows who is shooting and it’s on the rest to the group to stay down. Dumbass stood up in Cheney’s line of fire.
Listen, I’ve been on Squirrel hunts. You use a dog to chase them up a tree, then shoot them down with a .22.
At no time should you be aiming at anything person level.
Why would you hunt squirrels?
We eat them.
There are parts of the world where squirrels are invasive species. For example Grey Squirrels are invasive to the UK if I recall?
Edit, I just looked it up to fact check myself and yeah Eastern Grey Squirrels are invasive to the UK and parts of Europe and are a threat to native red Squirrels and the like. Ironically, they were introduced to the areas they’re now invasive in because people liked their aesthetics and wanted to hunt them. People are absolute idiots.
Yep. See also: foxes and rabbits in Australia.
Yup, see also humans, worldwide
And then they came for furries
Nonsense
He died because someone didn’t identify their target and exercise muzzle control.
exercise muzzle control
I’m loving the expensive sounding wording here but if you get shot durit a hunting trip it is hard to not see that as karma
what do ya know, more irresponsible gun owners. If only something could be done to prevent idiots from getting guns, this whole country would be much better off.
Suggestion: instead of only preventing idiots from getting their hands in guns, why not prevent idiots? You know, with quality, accessible public education.
