Golfer Kills Hawk

A professional golfer named Tripp Isenhour killed a hawk a few months ago, and it has hit the news this week. Read an article here. Or another one here.

He apparently was upset with the bird for making noise while he was trying to make an instructional video. He said, "It was unfortunate, but there'll be plenty of time for me to tell my story," and that it was foolish for people to believe he could have realistically hit the bird. "That's obviously people who don't know very much about golf," he said. "To say it's a one-in-a-million shot for an accident like that to happen, you know, and when it did happen, I was very remorseful, very upset that it happened." Another quote has him again referring to what happened as an accident.

An Accident? I could see this as an accident if he had hit the bird in the course of playing golf. Witnesses said he drove a golf cart toward the bird in order to hit golf balls at it from a closer location. "He was just going strangely out of the way to go after it," said Jethro Senger, a sound engineer at the shoot. "And it was almost, the whole thing was basically like a joke to him. The balls were getting closer and closer. 'Haha, look how close that one came.' 'That one was even closer.' "I yelled at him," Senger said. "I said, 'What did you expect was going to happen?," Senger said. "I said, 'You're a pro golfer, you're hitting line drives right at it.'"

He said he was only trying to scare the bird, so I guess he was trying to have the golf balls go really close to the bird to scare it away and the accident is that he actually hit the bird. I know intent is an important concept in the American legal system, so maybe he got some legal advice to comment only in ways that he never admits that he intended to hit or kill the hawk.