Jesse Ramdeo

The Head of the Hunters Search and Res­cue team has urged hunters as well as farm­ers to re­main cog­nisant of the haz­ards as­so­ci­at­ed with out­door ac­tiv­i­ty. Cap­tain Va­lence Ramb­harat is­sued the warn­ing fol­low­ing the death of 54-year-old Andy Mcin­tosh who ap­par­ent­ly suc­cumbed to a car­diac ar­rest while ei­ther hunt­ing or farm­ing close to a forest­ed area near his home in Ma­yaro on Thurs­day.

An alarm was raised when the fa­ther of six did not re­turn home by 11 pm.

Mem­bers of the Hunters Search and Res­cue team were con­tact­ed and start­ed comb­ing the area. Mcin­tosh's body was even­tu­al­ly dis­cov­ered near­ly 200 me­ters away from his home.

Cap­tain Ramb­harat urged hunters to be aware of their health sta­tus and take steps to avoid death and dis­abil­i­ty.

"My mes­sage would be as you age as a hunter, you are no longer young and there­fore dis­eases will set in, there will be ail­ments to look af­ter, and you have to be par­tic­u­lar­ly care­ful, and you have to know how much you can do in a par­tic­u­lar night hunt and do less and try to avoid dif­fi­cult hunts and try to avoid hunt­ing by your­self."

Mean­while, on the heels of a re­cent re­port of a hunter es­cap­ing death af­ter be­ing shot by a trap gun, Ramb­harat urged those tra­vers­ing forest­ed ar­eas to be on the look­out for trap guns (un­manned guns which are ex­treme­ly dan­ger­ous) set up in the for­est by "a small re­cal­ci­trant body of so-called hunters."

Ac­cord­ing to the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture, Land and Fish­eries, the hunt­ing sea­son will end on Feb­ru­ary 28.