PDGA: What happens when a disc hits an animal?

Friends of PETA, look away …

Life (and a baseball) comes at you fast:

No, this isn’t a disc golf-related incident. But a guillotine version of this is totally in the cards in our little sport. An ill-timed collision with a fast-flying Champion Firebird would be both amazing and horrifying. An explosion – or decapitation, rather – of aviary carnage.

Believe it or not, to a WAY lamer extent, this happened to me once.

I was the Randy Johnson in this scenario – not the obliterated pigeon.

This was nearly two decades back in Tulsa, Oklahoma when I first started disc golfing. It was a low-ceiling tunnel shot with long, unmowed grass lining the fairway. Trying to account for it, I hyzer-flipped a Champion Beast off the tee. Seventy-five feet from the teepad, a small flock of finches I hadn’t seen flew up from the ground at the most woefully inopportune of times.

For one tiny, unfortunate soul, it’d be the last flight he’d ever take. There was no incredible explosion of feathers or audible squawk, but he was certainly down for the count. Flailing a bit, the humane thing to do was to end it with a forceful stomp of the sneaker – so that’s what I did.

End of story.

Needless to say, it sucked for the bird.

And to this day, it sucks for the dog, deer, rabbit, squirrel, anaconda, etc.

But what comes of an animal flesh-seeking shot of this kind?

Is there any official PDGA rule on the books that atones for an untimely act of God?

Enter PDGA Rule No. 810.C Interference:

“A thrown disc that strikes a person or animal is played where it first comes to rest.”

In other words, there’s no difference between wind that unfairly picks up when it’s your turn to throw and a chipmunk that ruins your shot at taking down the 2016 Vibram Open in a playoff. And yes, I’m being intentionally specific, as that was a thing that actually happened.

You can’t make this stuff up:

Apart from slowing it down, the bird I nailed didn’t affect my shot much. However, you might not be so lucky. In the end, it doesn’t matter much. Where the disc comes to rest after hitting a woodland creature marks your next lie – NOT where your disc initially made contact with it.

You’d be wise to keep the Disc Golf Gods, as well as their fury friends, on your side.

Best of luck, Grandmother Willow.

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