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news
Smoking barrels (Licensed under CC BY SA 2.0 by Paul Wordingham on Flickr)Spanish mountain biker seriously injured after being accidentally shot by hunters
A mountain biker was seriously injured in Catalonia over the weekend after a hunter accidentally shot him with a rifle.
The 35-year-old cyclist was riding through a forested area near the town of Cabrils, about 30 kilometres north-east of Barcelona. Local police confirmed that an authorised hunt was taking place in the area at the time of the incident on Saturday.
According to officials, the cyclist was “gravely injured” and airlifted to Vall d'Hebron hospital near Barcelona.
A police investigation into the incident has been opened. No further details are available at this time.
> Cyclist shot by hunter who says he mistook him for a rabbit
While rare, we have reported on several cases over the years in which bike riders have been shot by hunters.
In November 2021 a cyclist in Spain, this time in the province of Alicante, had to be treated in hospital to have shotgun pellets removed after being shot by a hunter who had mistaken him for a rabbit.
In 2018 a British mountain biker living in the French Alps was unfortunately killed by a 22-year-old taking part in a shoot organised by a local hunting club.
Former Austrian national time trial champion Christiane Koschier was shot in 2014 while preparing for a time trial near Vicenza, Italy.
> Cyclist shot while warming up for time trial - hunter said he was aiming at a hare
Koschier, who spent the night in hospital but luckily suffered no long-term effects from the incident, joked afterwards that her rivals “can only stop me by shooting me.”
Main image licensed under CC BY SA 2.0 by Paul Wordingham on Flickr
After obtaining a PhD, lecturing, and hosting a history podcast at Queen’s University Belfast, Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
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16 comments
It's not just the hunters - their dogs are a "fire hazard" too. A few from 2018 / 19
https://nypost.com/2018/10/31/hunter-shot-in-the-back-by-his-dog/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/world/europe/dog-shoots-man-russia.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/19/us-man-mississippi-shot-dog-leg-amputation
Shot-weiler.
Perhaps like the Russian anti-tank dogs they were trained around the weapons in the first place and they were just trying to return them?
I'm strongly in favour of UK gun laws, although I suspect they're not strictly enough enforced
I have to say that I'm glad we have tougher laws against the use and ownership of firearms in the UK. My inlaws are in rural Bavaria and the ownership and use of firearms, and shotguns in particular, is fairly lax there. It's not wise to go walking/biking in some of the forest areas during the hunting season. And yep, there seems to be quite a bit of alcohol consumed too.
My parents live in rural Italy and during hunting season there it's pretty common to find buckshot embedded in the walls of the house after a hunter has just seen a bird and shot without considering what's behind it.
This is despite there being no trees anywhere near the house and it being surrounded by open fields.
My dad had an idiot try to shoot a bird about 10 ft above his head when he was stood next to the house. They're an absolute nightmare.
This story doesn't surprise me at all sadly. I lived in French Catalonia for 10 years in a mountain biking heaven but I eventually stopped riding in the hunting season as I had to many close calls. I'd come round a bend on a track only to be confronted by someone who heard movement swing round with shot gun cocked and ready to fire at me. It was always worse after lunch (they always enjoyed a good lunch with lots of wine). The protocols the hunters claimed to use stated that shot guns should always be carried open but clearly this wasn't adhered to.
The hunting lobby in France is very powerful, so much so that the facts about it are strongly suppressed. I once heard a statistic on the national radio news station that on average 50 people a year were killed in accidental shootings whilst hunting, which really means 2 every weekend during the hunting season. That never came up in the MSM.
I guess not many of us believe he mistook the cyclist for a rabbit which leads me to the conclusion that he took the shot believing he could get away with calling it an accident.
It is that season of the year again.
Last year a few mountainbikers and hikers were shot and they suspended all hunts for a while.
Maybe you shouldn't let drunk amateurs run around with guns?
At least it's Europe so they were using 'buckshot' or single shot rifles/shotguns.
If it had been in the US, they would be using Uzi and Armalite (because deer are so very dangerous...).
Indeed, I always find it funny that people in the US call the AR-15 style rifle a modern sporting Rifle.
In the UK a sporting rifle is a single shot bolt opearated rifle.... because one shot should be enough... but in the US they seem to need to rain lead down on their pray in the hope that they hit it..... just saying
I don't want to spend the rest of my life
Looking at the barrel of an Armalite
unfortunately no verses that relate to road violence to append here.
Health and safety gorn maaiird
How drunk the guy had to be to confuse a cyclist with a rabbit?
In Poland it is an open secret that hunting goes together with heavy drinking, but they at least use somehow more believable excuse of confusing a human with a wild boar.