A 78-year-old man is in critical condition after his bulldog, Eli, allegedly got excited in the cab of the pickup truck on the way to a deer-hunting trip and stepped on the trigger of a gun, firing into his owner’s leg. They were traveling on a bumpy dirt road when the Browning .308 discharged.

Billy Brown was accompanied by a friend he has hunted with for 25 years. Eli was probably just along for a fun time in the countryside, since he’s no hunting dog, and since dogs don’t exactly help hunt for deer anyway.

If only they’d been traveling with an unloaded gun.

This is our second dog-shoots-hunter story so far this month. The first story was about a duck-hunting dog whomanaged to shoot his owner in the heinie while in the great outdoors. Since I’ve been at Dogster, I’ve run numerous stories in which dogs are blamed for shooting their people. The victims are not always hunters, but they usually are. This is one of the more serious injuries, and we wish Mr. Brown a speedy recovery, but let’s try to learn something from this.

I know we have some hunters out there, because we’ve had really insightful responses to today’s earlier story of the status of the hunting dog an airport worker refused to load onto a plane because he appeared to be in very bad condition. So if you have any wisdom to share, please comment below.

‘Tis the season, and apparently ’tis the hunting season, so let’s be careful out there.

(Photo from the Flickr photostream of rotnbully)