Posted on 02/13/2006 10:38:19 AM PST by SirLinksalot
How Did Dick Cheney Break the No.1 Rule of Hunting?
For veteran sportsmen like the vice president, safety is a core value
By TIMOTHY J. BURGER/WASHINGTON
The cardinal rule of hunting could not be more simple: Don’t shoot the people (or the dogs). If there’s anyone in Washington who knows this, one would have thought it would be Vice President Dick Cheney, who accidentally shot his friend and fellow hunter Harry Whittington, 78, late Saturday afternoon. Whittington is expected to recover from his injuries, but the question will linger on: how does an accident like this happen among hunters with so much experience?
For years, Cheney's take-charge public image has been bolstered by photos of him fly fishing in Wyoming and stories about Cheney jetting into hunting hotspots for quail, pheasant and other game. While serving as a congressman from Wyoming — before President Bush’s father tapped him for secretary of defense in 1989 — Cheney was a solid ally of the National Rifle Association, the staunch defender of gun rights, which also preaches gun safety.
Cheney frequently hunts ducks in Arkansas, Texas and South Dakota. His hunting career had been relatively smooth until controversy arose after he was reported to have taken conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia hunting in Louisiana in 2004, just after the Court had agreed to hear a case involving the secrecy of documents related to the Vice President’s 2001 work heading an energy task force. (Cheney was in favor of keeping them secret.)
Cheney also drew attention for reportedly shooting ducks and some 70 pen-raised pheasants at the exclusive Rolling Rock Club in southwestern Pennsylvania in December 2003. Experts were quoted at the time as saying there’s nothing wrong, legally at least, with blasting away at stocked birds. But depending on how and when they are released, it should not be confused with actual hunting, since disoriented birds placed in the field or released in front of the shooters are often neither as wary or elusive as wild quarry.
An eyewitness account reported by the Associated Press suggests that Cheney may have, in the heat of the moment, violated the No. 1 rule of hunting by failing to keep track of his hunting buddies at all times. The AP quoted the ranch's owner saying that Cheney could easily have failed to see Whittington, as the latter walked up behind the Vice President from lower ground and in tall grass. To be sure, safety should be paramount for everyone in a hunting party and some responsibility would have fallen to Whittington to make sure his fellow hunters knew he might be just out of sight behind them. But for the shooter, hunting safety dictates that focusing on the target should never be more important than keeping in mind what's behind it.
Accidents can happen, of course, in a single careless moment. Quail, when you find them and they flush, don’t exactly follow gun-safety rules. They fly up suddenly and may go in any direction. And the first thing that happens to the hunter is the adrenaline rush. That’s why quail hunters wear orange, as Cheney's group reportedly were. And that’s why experts counsel the hunter not to sweep the shotgun around and fire if they don’t know what’s in the line of fire. Knowing what's behind the target is also a rule with which, one can bet, Cheney’s Secret Service detail would have wanted Whittington himself to be intimate.
What probably spared Whittington more critical injury was the tiny size of birdshot being used on the hunt; quail are typically hunted with No. 8 shot, which is even smaller than BBs. After the accident, Whittington's face "looks like chicken pox, kind of. He's so lucky, it's a miracle," Whittington's daughter Sally told the Dallas Morning News. Cheney visited Whittington in the hospital the next day. The vice president "feels so bad," said Sally Whittington. "He's a very accomplished hunter. He was obviously relieved to see how well my father was doing."
If Cheney now finds himself criticized or lampooned, he'll ironically be in the same position he himself put Senator John Kerry in during the final days of the 2004 Presidential campaign, though the circumstances then did not involve a potentially deadly accident. At the time, Cheney used his widely-known experience as a hunter to mock a duck-hunting foray in Ohio in which Senator John Kerry ended up shooting a goose. "The senator who gets a grade of 'F' from the National Rifle Association went hunting this morning," Cheney reportedly said, to hoots. "I understand he bought a new camouflage jacket for the occasion, which did make me wonder how regularly he does go goose hunting.” As the Texas incident shows, experience does not make hunters immune to accidents, which is why hunting advocacy groups put such a relentless focus on safety as the top priority.
It was locked and loaded in 2000. Thank God it misfired!
I once lived next to a joint that did canned pheasant hunts. They raised the pheasants from chicks in the spring and then put them in a one-acre aviary covered with mesh screening, and the birds would be large enough to hunt by fall. When they were ready to do a hunt, they would get a few pheasants, put them into cages and then drive over to the field and release the birds just before the clients showed up.
So the birds were semi-tame and some were so fat they could barely fly. They would flush close-in to the hunters slowly and straight up when the dog found them, and that was that. Not terribly sporting.
Other places will do quail or chuckas as well. More of those are prone to get away, but they make enough to where that is just part of the overhead.
Thank you....
Sounds like it. I'm glad my dad taught me to hunt and how to handle guns. Don't do much of either now, but it's good to know how to do both if the need arises.
The latest on Whittington...
That's truly gross.
They should just go to HEB or Albertsons and cut out the gunfire.
That said, I see nothing of the sort being done here.
(I do suspect they were flushing the coveys with jeeps or dune buggies, although that is NOT what the articles say. It's just how it's done in Texas by old men who don't want to walk. Drive up, get up scared up, jump out, shoot. Big potential for cross-shooting, unless you have the system down.)
That's probably a seasonal thing.
That sounds like a good assessment of what happened here.
To paraprhase "good shooting Tex"....;) Wild Turkey are some of my favorite birds, but any thing that will stand and look at you......well, .22 Hornet normally makes short work of that. I live in some of the best turkey hunting area of the US, I have pictures of HUNDREDS at a time. I also have a picture of the infamous "turkey tree", 30-40 turkeys, all big bearded males, sitting in a cottonwood tree looking at me. Perhaps I'm spoiled......
Never did understand that kind of game farm hunting. Just doesn't seem quite right to me. I don't mind if people do it, since all our meat gets killed one way or another, but it sure doesn't seem like the hunting I know.
Oh well. I'm going to quit for the day and think about turning some pork chops a nice brown, with crispy edges on the fat. Some beans and a small salad. Yeah...that's the ticket.
To The MSM;
It was NOT Buck Shot, it was Bird Shot!!! Get it F*CKIN straight!!!
Wow! In the coming weeks we are going to get schooled by the left about guns and hunting!
Should be fun!
HOW TRUE! It'll be like a virgin trying to teach a hooker about how to watch out for Tricks...Roflmao
Sounds good (I love wild turkey), but in correction to my last post, the last turkey I killed was with the windshield of Ford F-350 going about 80 mph, just outside of Big Lake Texas, heading to Del Rio on the first day of (black powder?) hunting season, which had them all stirred up.
They do fly!
Smashed the heck out of the windshield. I just took my foot off the gas, pushed up the glass, and pressed the gas again.
Did he hit the quail?
Dan was there?
(Sorry, sometimes I will pop if I don't get the corny crap out. It was waving a flag and shouting, "Over here! Over here! Corny joke in aisle 13!")
Thank you, local hunting laws would make sense. Welcome to FR, excellent posts.
Oh yea! I've watched them fly around all over, it took another FReeper to explain that the poor bastards raised on a farm couldn't........insert WKRP in Cincinnati joke here......
You're lucky, the only big bird I've ever seen hit was a buzzard........not pretty.
What a putz article. What a putz magazine.
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