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Iowa teen dies after being mistaken for squirrel during hunting trip, officials say
(www.cbsnews.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
409 points (99.3% liked)
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When I took my state's required hunter safety course, one of the instructors was an older dude with grey hair and a ponytail who wouldn't look out of place at a Dead & Company concert.
To point out the importance of wearing an orange hat during small game seasons, and also to "be sure of your target and what lies beyond it" he pointed out how much that grey hair and ponytail would look a lot like a squirrel if you only caught a glimpse of it through some brush.
Not saying that's exactly what happened here, the kid doesn't look like he was the grey ponytail type, but the article shook loose that memory in my head.
EDIT: not that I'm ungrateful, but somehow this is now my highest rated comment on Lemmy, and I'm just curious why this one in particular resonated to well.
Aside from emphasizing the hat, that also seems like an opportunity to emphasize the importance of positively identifying one's target and backstop. It's reckless to shoot at something that might be a valid target.
Quickscope lmao /s
A real hunter bunny hops, spins 360 with no scope.
Fair, I hadn't thought of that but it makes sense. My first thought was that it was a very blatant murder cover up. But ive apparently fallen too deep into fiction if that's what cane to mind first.
I'm not really into that sort of fiction, but it's not that weird a thought to have.
You hang around conspiracy theorists much? Maybe too many crime shows on TV? I mean I thought I was cynical, but to have that be the first thing that occurs to you (and it sounds like you were pretty damned sure of it, too) blows me away.
It's not an uncommon thing both historically and in modernity, it's got a built in cover of shit sometimes happens. Hell one of my ancestors got away with it 5 times before the Mormons figured out he was just murdering them and pawning their shit 2 towns over.
I'd like to read that story if you're willing to share it.
Not much to say about it in a particularly verbose way. Back when the Mormons were in Missouri he took a couple bounties that some nearby towns put out on the Mormon men in general, so he befriended some of the Mormons pretending to be a hunter from Arkansas and then led them to the woods and slit their throats one by one. He basically did this because he was bored and there was a lull in work for his lumber and crops, the pawning off their shit was just a bit of extra money.
Don't know if anything was ever written about it, pretty sure this happened before Missouri declared open season the the Mormons and I think the bounties were technically illegal. Who knows maybe the Mormons wrote about it but it's nothing fancy.
Edit: he didn't actually slit their throats, I've been playing a high casualty MGS2 run because reasons and the imagery is stuck in my head. He shot them in the back.
Eh, I just read a lot of grimdark and grimderp stories. The kind where nothing good ever happens and the bad guys always get away with everything just because it would make the main character's life worse. I'm a cashier, not law enforcement, so doesn't matter if my first instinct is skewed if I have other people to make decisions for me.
Do you expect to remain in such a position for the rest of your life? Assuming not, then stepping back from such dark material to gain some more level-headed perspective might be wise.
Let people choose their own path in life.
Not sure how I might've come across as demanding they change. That was not my intent,
Common sense is hard to come by.
I saw the poor kid’s hair in the thumbnail and was like “oh no.”
There are a LOT of brown squirrels in the Midwest.
I’d make sure to cut my hair AND wear a hat if I was going squirrel hunting and had hair like that.
Isn't it true that orange looks green to animals?
For the animals that tigers prey on... yes. The orange and black pattern of most tigers stand out like a sore thumb to us, but to the animals tigers hunt they absolutely look green and blend in perfectly with the forest/jungle.
TIL i'm a trichromat, thanks.
I'm no expert on animal color vision, but different animals absolutely see color differently, some have markedly worse color vision than humans, others are even better
And of course we can't really know for certain how different animals perceive color since we can't actually see the world through their eyes as it gets processed through their brain, though we can make some pretty educated guesses.
AFAIK, most mammals except for some primates (like humans) and a few other exceptions, have dichromatic vision (have only 2 kinds of cone cells in their eyes instead of 3 like we do) so there's gonna be some "gaps" in their color vision, and one of the common configurations is similar to red-green colorblindness in humans and would make orange look very similar or indistinguishable from green but the specifics do vary from one species to another.
Other types of animals like many fish, birds, and reptiles actually have 4 types of cones and so can see parts of the spectrum we can't (though it doesn't necessarily mean they can or can't see the same colors we do and then some, where we have receptors for red, blue, and green light, they might have for example, red, blue, blue-green, and green, giving them essentially the same range of color vision we do but with extra sensitivity to the blue/green part of the spectrum)
And then of course you have animals like mantis shrimp with 12 or 16 types of receptors.
What is the hardest color for deer to see?
While deer have no trouble seeing short-wavelength colors like blue and green, their eyes are not well adapted to seeing long-wavelength colors, such as red and orange. This is what makes hunter-orange so useful in the field. Humans see it as a neon alert of another hunter's presence while deer see it as a muted yellowish-gray that blends in reasonably well in mixed woods.
https://www.fieldandstream.com/stories/hunting/deer-hunting/what-colors-can-deer-see