Hobby hunter shoots at quail and hits jogger in the face

On Sunday morning, 14 June 2026, around nine o'clock, a 68-year-old man was jogging along a road near Rosa Vecchia, a district of San Vito al Tagliamento in the northern Italian province of Pordenone.

It was his usual route. A few metres beside the path, on a training ground designated as «Zona cinofila Sanvitese», a 49-year-old hobby hunter was training his dogs. A quail had been released on the field as a live target for the training.

The hobby hunter fired a shotgun blast at the bird. Some of the shot pellets missed the quail and struck the jogger on the arm and face, one of them close to his right eye. Paramedics from the rescue service treated the man on the spot and then took him to the hospital in Pordenone for an ophthalmological examination. There was no danger to his life, but the injury to the eye was serious enough that permanent damage was a possibility. The Carabinieri are investigating the circumstances and checking whether the safety regulations of the dog zone were observed.

What "crime" had the quail committed?

None. The quail bore no guilt, no reason, no offence. It was a living prop, released so that hunting dogs could practise flushing and retrieving. Its death was planned from the outset. That a person passing by nearly lost an eye when it was shot at is the logical consequence of a practice in which shot is fired close to public paths.

Double standards

Imagine a private individual had fired a shotgun on a Sunday morning in a busy local recreation area and put a load of shot next to a jogger's eye. There would be an arrest, a confiscation of the weapon, a charge of dangerous bodily harm, presumably pre-trial detention. Were a police officer on duty to fire so uncontrollably in the direction of a passer-by, a disciplinary and criminal review would be beyond question.

For the hobby hunter, a different standard applies. Here it is called a «hunting accident», the weapon was «legally acquired», the terrain «marked with signs». The investigation amounts to the charge of negligent bodily harm, and experience from across the entire German-speaking region shows that such proceedings rarely have any noticeable consequences. Shooting living animals as a leisure activity enjoys a legal and social safe space unlike any other armed handling of firearms.

This case is not an Italian anomaly. In November 2025, two walkers in Grossefehn in Lower Saxony were hit by shot from a driven hunt. At the end of November 2024, a 64-year-old hobby hunter died in Oulens-sous-Echallens in the canton of Vaud from a shot fired by a fellow hunter. The list of injured and killed bystanders, from walkers and cyclists to children, is long and grows longer year after year. Wherever shooting takes place for the pleasure of hobby hunters, people inevitably end up in the line of fire too.

The question is not whether such incidents are «isolated cases». The question is why an activity that regularly endangers bystanders continues to be treated as a harmless hobby, instead of what it ultimately is: a calculated endangerment of the general public.