by Skinna » 27 Sep 2020, 11:17 am
Well, i may as well join in with a speculative comment...but given there isnt enough factual info available, that all it is, speculation from my point.
On the surface, it looks to me as if a couple of trigger happy blokes have got a farmer assist job & had it in their heads that they can go shoot anything...
Its easy to get disorientated with distance when out in those vast areas, especially if youre not accustomed to it.
Not that the mallee region of SE Aus is comparable to station country, but as an example, I shoot on some paddocks in the mallee, that are as big as most farms the average once or twice a year bunny & fox plinker get to shoot on in close-ish proximity to the cities. Take those guys out in that terrain & they get lost in the first stubble paddock, loose all sense of direction & distance, dont know boundaries & have a hard time grasping that it may take me 2 hrs to loop one half of a property with a spotlight, provided we dont shoot anything...you may be a "good shooter", but if youre not familiar with vast areas getting out of place is easy done.
And in this case, 4km away from a homestead would seem an eternity to those only or mostly used to hunting the typical 400-1000 acre lots.
So if these blokes are a couple of shooters who landed a job, & who have heard all the tales of "shoot anything", along with being inexperienced at shooting in wide open & vast territory, not to mention, (as it sounds may be the case), not have experience in culling horses or be in harmony with their behavior, this disaster could easily happen..!
So they may well call themselves "seasoned shooters", but that doesnt mean they are good at what they were doing.
But, as marksman says...they obviously werent deemed to be breaking the law--or they would already be locked up & the story would have hit the media in a bigger way with 'illegal shooting' & 'firearms offenses' being the slogans driving the headlines.
Anyway...this type of thing happens more than we think...it is just kept quiet...
Maybe in this case someone isnt happy to be "appeased".
It'll be interesting to see what the story is & what happens about it.
Last edited by
Skinna on 29 Sep 2020, 7:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.