Deer hunting is safe
Deer hunting has a safety record that far exceeds many other sporting and recreational activities.
Between 2000 and 2005, in Victoria, there was one death related to deer hunting. This compares with 109 deaths in other sporting activities. The chart below illustrates the comparative safety of deer hunting.
The single death involved a participant in deer hunting. This means that between 2000 and 2005 there were no deaths involving non-participants in deer hunting.
The deer hunting safety record is excellent given that this is the major winter recreational use of the alpine area below the snowline including parts of the Alpine National Park, surrounding State Forest and the Gippsland coast.
The above data is from the National Coroner's Information System (NICS). The NCIS is a world first national database of coronial information, which contains data from the coronial files of all Australian states and territories (except Queensland) dating back to 1 July 2000. Queensland data commences from 1 January 2001.
The relative safety of deer hunting is also highlighted in “Hospital Admitted sports injury in Victoria, July 2002 to June 2003" Victorian Admitted Episodes Dataset (VAED)
The table below shows the number of hospital admissions for various sports for 2002/03.
This should be compared to just one admission for deer hunting.
Safety statistics
Hospital Admitted sports injury in Victoria, July 2002 to June 2003
To estimate the frequency, rate and comparative risk of hospitalisation among sports (including active recreation), in Victoria, records were selected from the Victorian Admitted Episodes Dataset (VAED) if the activity when injured was ‘while engaged in sports'.
Analysis of the comparative risk of hospitalisation per participant across the identified sports was completed utilising available participation data.
Adult participation data were obtained from ‘Participation in exercise, recreation and sport, 2001', Australian Sports Commission (ASC).
Information drawn from Victorian Emergency Minimum Dataset (VEMD) for the eight year time period January 1996 to December 2004. The VEMD is a dataset containing records of emergency department presentations in 35 Victorian hospitals, covering all hospitals in Victoria, which have a 24-hour emergency department.
Please note that the identification of ‘hunting' related incidents involves searching for the text term "hunt" or "shoot" in the 'description of injury event variable' and therefore relies on this information being entered at the time of patient presentation in the busy emergency department. Unfortunately, this "real time" data entry in a busy emergency department means that quality of narratives is varied and may underestimate the incidence of hunting related injuries, i.e. Narratives are not detailed enough to mention the activity "hunting"
Therefore, changes in the number of injuries that is evident in this data provided may be a result of changes in data quality, and may not necessarily reflect an increase or decrease in injury incidence.