This is a terrible thing, but for those who won't have a round chambered while hunting do you do the same thing with your shotguns while hunting?
We hunt cold most of the time when carrying rifles.
Rarely so with shotguns.
But the circumstances are also very different.
In what way?
First, when we are near the vehicles and have a distance to go to where we will be hunting, both rifles and shotguns are unloaded. But that isn't so much hunting as travel by a different means.
When big game hunting we will often spend the day and return to the vehicle without ever loading the chamber. There have been things like skylined game and game bounding away and offering only a 'Texas heart shot' that have cost me game but I can't think of a single instance where an empty chamber has done so. On the contrary, I can think of many instances where we loaded the chamber in anticipation of a shot opportunity, but even those were mostly dry holes.
Walking the CRP land, harvested crop fields, grasslands or sage for small game is a different story - we load the shotgun chambers before we start. Laying in a ditch waiting for geese, an unloaded chamber works fine. Hunting doves, loaded chamber - I need all the shots the gun will hold.
Years ago I hunted elk with a dude form LA. Last day of the hunt he informed us his safety was broken. We asked if he hunted empty chamber. His response was no, but he kept his finger off the trigger. We never let him hunt with us again.
Much of my career has been spent fixing things that are broken - and there has been no shortage of such work. Mechanical safeties and humans are both prone to failure. An empty chamber is not.
