Hunting Safer Than Round Of Golf

Hunting generally has been perceived as a dangerous sport, but it may be safer than golf.

A new report from the National Safety Council ranked hunting as the outdoor pastime with by far the lowest number of injuries requiring hospital emergency room treatment.

For every 100,000 hunters who went afield in 1991, the most recent study year, only eight sustained a qualifying injury.

Compare this with fishing, which accounted for 141 injuries per 100,000 participants - or to golf’s 104. And for every 100,000 people who bicycled, 905 ended up in the hospital.

Research shows that guns are responsible for less than 10 percent of hunting injuries.

A study of hunter casualties in Montana from September 1990 to January 1991, undertaken by two physicians and reported in the Journal of Wilderness Medicine, showed that nearly 48 percent of the 134 non-fatal hunting injuries took the form of lacerations, typically from a knife, most often incurred during field-dressing and butchering of game.

Bruises, sprains and broken bones accounted for another 33 percent of the trouble, often a result of falls and mishaps in mountainous terrain.

Researchers unveiled one unexpected perspective when studying hunting fatality statistics. Sparsely populated Montana proved to be a more dangerous hunting ground than “overcrowded” Pennsylvania.

Six deaths out of 221,000 hunters gave Montana a hunter-fatality rate of 2.7 per 100,000, while Pennsylvania’s rate among more than 1 million hunters was 0.36.