Thread: Hunter shot in Kaimai Range near Te Aroha

Originally Posted by stretch

Although 64% of firearms incidents [not necessarily fatalities] while hunting large game ARE due to misidentification, perhaps we should wait a bit before analysing it. Nothing has come out about this fatality to suggest it's a case of target misidentification. It may have been self-inflicted during a trip or a fall.



If you ARE indeed referring to target misidentification, records have been kept since 1979, and 26 of the 39 years since then have had a fatality attributed to target misidentification. So there have been 13 years where there were none.




No. If there was no intent to kill a person, then it's manslaughter.




Yeah, nah. Sorry, I'm going to go there. IF this was a case of target misidentification, then it CAN happen to anyone. Humans are fallible, and will always make mistakes. You can follow the 7 basic rules and still fuck it up. In most cases of misidentification of the target, the shooter was adamant they were shooting at an animal. Confirmation Bias is a real thing where your brain tricks itself into seeing what it is expecting to see. It happens to pilots and has explained various plane crashes, and it happens to hunters who are searching the bush for a deer. They are thinking "is that a deer" and looking for things that reinforce that view, rather than asking " is it a person" and looking for evidence of that.

We ask ourselves the wrong questions in the heat of the moment and it sends us to the wrong conclusion.

There are no such things as accidents, so instead of pointing the finger at the shooter and saying "they fucked up. They didn't follow the rules", we need to find out HOW and WHY they messed up and got it so wrong. That way we can indentify the what went wrong and develop techniques to reduce the number of times it occurs.

There is a whole subject on this, called Human Factors - a study on how and why humans make mistakes and how they contribute to accidents. This is not unique to hunting, as it happens across industries. Aviation, Maritime shipping, Oil & Gas, Medicine, etc.

Yes, the shooter is to blame, but blame does nothing to prevent this happening again. I'm interested in the nitty gritty of the how and the why, and hopefully learning something from this tragedy. Cognitive biases do not make these mistakes ok, but it helps us understand how and why they happen so we can be aware of our own fallibility and develop techniques to mitigate it.

This is a good time to stop and have a read of Mountain Safety Council's research on hunting accidents and fatalities. https://issuu.com/nzmountainsafetyco...22887/44292171

No, not if you follow them.