The facts are clear... and the International Hunting Education Association which moniters Hunting Education and Hunting accidents everywhere in North America publishes them if you care to look!
This 1998 IHEA hunting accident report is based on information received from 48 states and 5Canadian provinces. Reports were not received from Alaska, Alberta, Mexico, British Columbia, Northwest Territories, Quebec, Ontario, Prince Edward Island or the Yukon.
The use of blaze or hunter orange has been shown to reduce vision related casualties in states that require its use. The use of blaze orange clothing could decrease the number of vision related casualties even further. Its continued use is recommend for all hunting activity except possibly for migratory bird hunting. In most cases, the number of casualties could be reduced by over 50 percent if vision related casualties could be eliminated.
BR
I was researching hunter accidents a few years ago and I ran across this report. Specifically I was trying to determine how often hunters accidently shoot other hunters and/or hikers/mountain bikers etc. -due to mistaken identity- in BC.
What I basically found was that it doesn't really happen. I mean, it happens once in awhile, but it's really not significant.Over a 6 year period in BC, about 500 000 HL's are sold, and you may have one incident of this type. Probably less. You are far more likely to shoot yourself, or shoot your partner while getitng in and out of a vehicle wihtout unloading.. Even more likely is that you have a heart attack or suffer some mishap, everything from car crashes, plane crashes, horse wrecks and drownings. Making everyone wear orange with these sort of numbers seemed like a waste of time.
This report wasn't much use to me, since BC didn't report. Then again, neither did Quebec, Ontario, PEI. So since this discussion is about orange, I'm not sure if it will help determine the effectiveness of orange in those provinces, either.
And for you fellas that think it reduces your deer hunting success here is some biology for ya.
Deer are essentially red-green color blind like some humans. Their color vision is limited to the short (blue) and middle (green) wavelength colors. As a result, deer likely can distinguish blue from red, but not green from red, or orange from red. Therefore, it appears that hunters would be equally suited wearing green, red, or orange clothing but perhaps slightly disadvantaged wearing blue.
Has anyone checked goats, caribou, elk, moose, sheep , coyotes, wolves, cougars, black and grizzlies for this?
I don't think it orange would put me at a disadvantage while hunting, because of this colour blindness. That's not the point.
The point is that we aren't mistakenly shooting each other to any great degree now, so it's unlikely to enhance safety to any great degree, so all it would do is annoy people and CO's who would have to enforce the rules.
