The Problem
Rabbits tales
I was in despair, a potentially good score had been ruined by inexplicably missing five, slow moving, quartering rabbits. On the face of it they were not difficult targets. I am not one of those shooters with a rabbit phobia; in fact up to that point, in my short shooting career, I quite liked rabbits. It was not so much the fact of missing that upset me, more importantly I did not understand why I had missed them. My confidence had taken quite a knock.
I knew that finding a solution to this difficulty would need outside help. I count myself fortunate in having as my shooting coach Carl Bloxham. As well as having a competitive shooting career that few have equalled (World Sporting Champion) Carl is a superb coach and natural teacher. I speak with some experience having been professionally involved in skills education for over 28 years.
As I described my bunny problem to Carl he asked a number of pertinent questions. What colour was the clay? What was the background? What was the direction of travel? He then replicated the problem target and sure enough I missed them again. This time however he had the reason for the lost targets. A change in eye dominance!
Until that point I have to admit to having a very limited knowledge of eye dominance issues. I remember being tested for dominance when I first started shooting and was happy that as a right handed shooter I was right eye dominant. The fact that dominance can change, even temporarily, was news to me.
In fact, fatigue, stress, aging eyes, certain target presentations or just the very act of putting a shotgun in front of the eye can result in a temporary change of dominance. Few fully understand why and how dominance changes. Suffice it to say that the brain is a highly complex mechanism that is able to cope with a huge range of stimuli and information which it has to filter and prioritise. As a result it will always favour the information from one eye over the other. When the brain decides to favour the view from the eye not over the rib the shotgun the shooter has problems.
Take a look at the view over the rib in Fig1. If your brain were to choose to use that view on a target you would have no chance.
Some Solutions
Shooters have developed a number of strategies to overcome dominance issues:-
1. The fibre optic foresight is believed to trick the brain into taking its information from the eye over the rib.
2. Many shooters close one eye for all or some of the shooting process, this gives instant remission of any dominance issues but this one eyed approach brings with it a number of problems:- The brain benefits from binocular vision because two eyes give maximum acuity, maximum contrast sensitivity, maximum depth and distance judgement and maximum peripheral awareness(with two eyes open the shooter gets a field of view of about 180°this is reduced to 150° once one eye is closed).
3.It is possible to partially obstruct the view of the non dominant eye so that as the shot is taken the brain must select the dominant eye for information. The masking can be achieved by a number of methods, adhesive tape, Vaseline on the lens. I have even seen snot suggested!
It is this approach that many experts favour but it is difficult to get consistent results. How thick should the Vaseline be? What grade of snot should be used?