YES, INDEED, HUNTING IS SAFER THAN TRUCK-NOSING!
By Peter Muller
One of my pet peeves is reading an article in which numbers are
presented without citing a source. In a recent Letter to the Editor in a
local paper, a “Master Teacher of Hunting Safety,” licensed and
sanctioned by the New York State Department of Environmental
Conservation (DEC) and the N.R.A. states: “Hunting is 100 times safer
than swimming and 50 times safer than football.” Don’t believe it? So,
refute it! After hearing “Hunting is 30 times safer than tennis, 50
times safer than golf, 100 times safer than driving,” and other
statements of that kind, I finally decided to investigate. I believe
C.A.S.H. has now come up with a rational basis for assigning relative
risks to different activities.
Even though there were 83 times as many injuries caused by swimming
as there were by hunting, we have to take into consideration how many
people engaged in each activity and how often.
To use a hypothetical example to make the point, let’s say there is a
“sport” called “truck-nosing.” Truck-nosing consists of running out on a
highway when you see a truck coming and trying to touch the front bumper
with your nose. Let’s say that on 80% of all such outings an injury
occurs. Let’s also say that nationwide there are 100 truck-nosers who
spend an average of 2 days a year engaging in their spot (the rest of
the time is spent in hospitals). We would expect a total of 160 injuries
a year from the sport of truck nosing. On the other hand, and in fact,
there are 24,000,000 golfers a year that spend an average of 6 days a
year each year golfing and have a total of 37,556 injuries. Using hunter
logic, we would conclude that hunting is 83 times safer than swimming,
and truck-nosing is (37,556/160) or 235 times safer than golfing since
golfing causes 235 times as many injuries as truck nosing. But when you
tell mom not to worry because you’re going truck-nosing, which is 235
times safer than golfing, do you think she’ll go for your statistics?
Why not? We must take into consideration the number of people that
engage in each activity and the number of days a year each participant
engages in the activity. We take the total number of participants and
multiply it by the average number of days that each participant engages
in the activity to come up with the total activity days. The total
activity days tells us how much time people engage in that activity. If
there are 100 truck-nosers spending an average of two days a year in
that activity, then the total annual activity days for truck-nosing is
200. Similarly, the total annual activity days for golfing is 24,000,000
times 6 or 144,000,000 activity days. Since during the 144,000,000
activity days of golf there were 37, 556 injuries, on average it took
3,834 activity days to produce one injury. Let’s call that number the
mean number of days between injuries. Another way of putting it is if
you decide to go out golfing one day, your chances of being injured are
1 out of 3,834. On average, you can play golf on 3,834 days before you
can expect to sustain an injury. Truck-nosers obviously don’t’ do as
well: since 200 activity days produce 160 injuries, the mean number of
days between injuries is 200/160 or 1.25. Truck-nosers shouldn’t expect
to be able to engage in their activity for more than 1.25 days without
an injury. This mean number of days between injuries is what allows us
to rationally compare the relative safety of different activities. Using
the example above, we can say that golf is 3,834/1.25 or 3,067 times
safer than truck-nosing, which is what Mom knew all along.
In applying the same analysis to hunting and some other selected
activities to come up with relative risks, my first stop was the
National Safety Council in Illinois. They were very helpful in
furnishing some basic numbers concerning the activities. They were also
helpful in furnishing their sources.
One of the first questions I tried to answer was “What is an injury?”
To be counted as an “injury,” treatment in a hospital emergency room was
a requirement. This may not be perfect, but at least it’s consistent
among activities (the exception is hunting). The National Safety
Council’s source for hunting-related injuries is The Hunter Education
Association in Draper, Utah (801) 571-9461. According to them, the only
injuries reported are due to weapons discharges. So, if a hunter falls
down and breaks his neck or sprains an ankle, the injury is not
recorded. Since the focus in hunting injuries is on weapons discharges,
non weapons-related injuries go unreported. That alone invalidates the
comparison with other activities. The Hunter Education Association, with
which I spoke at length on several occasions, said that nobody is
keeping counts of non-weapons related hunting injuries. In the absence
of those numbers, we cannot meaningfully compare hunting injuries to
injuries in other activities.
We have a better chance at relative risk assessment when we deal with
fatal injuries. I believe that fatalities in hunting are partially due
to weapons discharges, but also to a substantial extent to other causes.
The same “Master Teacher,” who unwittingly motivated this investigation,
told me that most hunting fatalities are due to heart attacks because
many hunters are in awful physical shape.
Associated with sports injuries and fatalities are two categories:
direct and indirect. A direct fatality would be a shot in the head; an
indirect fatality would be a hunter who falls into a creek, catches
pneumonia and dies. In football, for example, the direct fatalities are
due to injuries (such as head injuries on the playing field) – an
indirect fatality would be a heart attack or stroke due to
over-exertion.
Death attributable to hunting in this analysis includes first of all
the number furnished by the Hunter Education Association. There are
numerous articles each year in the hunting literature about hunters who
get lost and die of exposure, hunters dozing off and falling out of tree
stands, hunters attempting to traverse rough terrain and dying from
stroke, heart attack or other systems failures. When comparing hunting
to other sport deaths, these should also be included. Since in all other
cases, both the direct deaths and the indirect deaths are included, we
have to take a reasonable guess at how many indirect fatalities there
are. I am willing to defer to the alleged “Master Teacher,” who is
telling me that I should at least double the number of direct
fatalities.
Furthermore, since game management is deliberately causing
overpopulation of game species, human traffic fatalities due to deer car
collisions are also attributable to hunting. If there were no hunting,
the white-tailed deer population would not be artificially pumped up to
25,000 nationally by wildlife mismanagement and, most likely, would
stabilize around 500,000. Deer-car collisions would subside and
fatalities due to deer-car collisions would probably disappear. We may
want to include those fatalities as indirect hunting fatalities as well.
Given those procedures and methods, here is how hunting stacks up
against other activities.
