Don’t sacrifice safety, hunters urged

BELLEVILLE – Ben Harvey, manager of Chesher’s Outdoor Store, checks a customer’s firearms licence before he makes a sale. Checking licences before a sale is required by Ontario law. Deer-hunting season in the Quinte region started Monday. Photo by Alisa Howlett

By Alisa Howlett

BELLEVILLE – What is normally a fun, family tradition can take a turn for the worse when safety is compromised, avid hunter Ben Harvey says.

Deer hunting season for a large part of the Quinte area opened at the start of this week. Hunters are heading to Northumberland County and the Peterborough area, as well as the Madoc area and north through Bancroft.

Since the start of the season there have been two incidents in this region involving self-inflicted firearm injuries.

“I can’t believe that any of this is happening. It’s crazy – guns have safeties. How people shoot themselves – it doesn’t make any sense,” said Harvey, manager of Chesher’s Outdoor Store on Maitland Drive in Belleville.

All hunters in Ontario are required to take a hunter safety course and the Canadian firearms course. And at Chesher’s, hunters who come in get safety tips.

“So everybody is well trained and licensed before they go into the woods,” Harvey said. “How those accidents happened is just carelessness on a few people’s parts.”

Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources has conservation officers on duty regulating hunters during the season, but Harvey said he has only seen a few of them. It is really up to hunters to police themselves when it comes to safety, he said.

“As hunters, we police (ourselves) heavily, because worst-case scenario is someone gets shot and killed. Safety is very, very important.”

Ministry of Natural Resources official Jolanta Kowlaski said she could not give an exact number of conservation officers in the area because they are deployed throughout Ontario.

Kowalski said she suspects the shooting incidents – one not far from Madoc and the other in the Havelock  area – occurred due to violations of basic firearms safety rules. Those rules include:

• Assume every gun is loaded.
• Point your gun in a safe direction.
• Keep your finger off the trigger.
• Before you shoot, be 100-per-cent sure of your target.

“It is up to the individual hunter to put this information into practice and to hunt responsibly,” Kowalski said.

As another safety precaution, hunters are required to wear 400 square centimetres of orange on their body and an orange hat.

Dave Pind, a hunter-education official of the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters, said mistakes are bound to happen.

“There are always mistakes. We have hundreds of thousands of people that drive cars and there are obviously accidents all the time because people do make mistakes,” Pind said. “Luckily, over the years the number of (hunting) accidents have come way down.”

Pind said he attributes the declining number of accidents and fatalities to hunter education.

In 1960, when hunter education became mandatory, the federation recorded 37 fatalities and 118 incidents. Ten years later, when more regulations were introduced, there were 12 fatalities and 115 incidents. Last year, there was only one recorded fatality and five incidents in Ontario throughout all hunting seasons. During that time the hunter population has remained steady, Pind said, so the decline in accidents is not a result of there being fewer people out hunting.

Harvey said that as long as people keep making poor decisions there will be hunting accidents.

“You choose to point a loaded gun at yourself when you’re talking to your buddies, you have made a really bad decision. Just like when you choose to drive too fast on icy roads, you have made a really bad decision,” he said.

Harvey also said alcohol consumption can be an issue.

“Believe it or not, there is no rule that says you can’t get loaded and shoot a gun,” he said.

The end of deer-hunting season is Nov. 17.