Hunter Orange: A Bright Idea Or Just More Rules? When People Point Guns, It’S Better To Be Safe Than Sorry

Sun., Nov. 12, 2000

Rich Landers Outdoors Editor

I was a 10-year-old-Montanan when I received my first hunting rifle. It came wrapped in a hunter-orange vest.

My father couldn’t protect me from every danger that lurked in the mountains. But a few precautions were no-brainers in our household.

Hunter education isn’t kid stuff, and that’s why Dad took the hunter education course with me. We buckled our seat belts on the drive to the hunt and wore hunter orange while in the field.

A Kootenai County prosecutor deserves praise from families for proposing a fluorescent-orange clothing requirement for Idaho hunters.

Americans have a constitutional right to be stupid, and a small faction of the macho hunting crowd is out to prove it.

Some hunters would rather wear camouflage or earth-tone colors, even though two hunting fatalities in North Idaho last fall — and several others in recent years — could have been avoided if the victims had been wearing hunter orange.

This doesn’t vindicate the hunters who carelessly pulled triggers while aiming at a target they couldn’t positively identify as a deer or elk.

But pointing fingers doesn’t make the victims any less dead.

Hunting is a sport in which people point guns.

Military tests show that fluorescent orange - also known as blaze orange or hunter orange - stands out positively. Idaho is one of only six states that do not have a blaze-orange clothing requirement for hunters.

The best woodsman in the world is helpless against one idiot hunter who squeezes a trigger without positively identifying his target.

Hunter orange prevents two tragedies: a death and a prison sentence.

Wearing hunter orange virtually eliminates the chance of hunting accidents in the “mistaken for game” category. Aiming at and shooting a hunter wearing fluorescent orange clothing is no accident. It’s murder.

The search and rescue of a lost or injured hunter who’s wearing the bright colors is much simpler than the hunt for a sportsman wearing camouflage.

Yet wearing hunter orange has never been a deterrent to big-game or upland bird hunting. Be still and downwind and deer and elk won’t see you, especially in the newer orange clothing with camouflage patterns.

The success of a hunt isn’t necessarily just to bring home game to the family. The most important goal is to come home.

You can contact Outdoors editor Rich Landers by voice mail at 459-5577, extension 5508.

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