Now that's a hunting dog!

Carrabelle’s Ray Messer always knew his deer dogs had a good set of noses.

What he didn’t know was that they could handle a shotgun, too.

On the morning of Jan. 26, Messer and his brother, Pleas, and Ray’s son, Michael, were out hunting north of Carrabelle, up Highway 67, in Liberty County.

Their two dozen dogs were tracking a deer along County Road 22, the right-of-way where the power lines run, when a nice-looking buck crossed the road, and Michael Messer shot it.

That’s when the trouble started, according to Eric Johnston, the investigator with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission who took the report.

Johnston said the dogs all piled into the fallen buck, prompting Ray, Pleas and Michael to go after them and try to put them into their boxes.

“They had laid a Remington 870, a 12-gauge pump shotgun, on the ground,” said Johnston. “During all the catching, evidently one of the dogs stepped on the trigger assembly of the shotgun, and it pushed the safety and the trigger at the same time and discharged the firearm.”

That sent the nine .36-inch pellets inside the 00-buck 2 ¾ -inch shell flying, one of which struck Ray in the right hand, about 15 to 20 feet away.

“They’re pretty good-sized pellets, like a ball bearing,” said Johnston. “One pellet hit him on the back side of the hand near the middle and ring fingers, and then came out the palm of his hand. Two of the other pellets hit the dog he was holding, and the other six are unaccounted for.”

Ray bandaged his hand and called his wife, who drove him to Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, Johnston said. Doctors performed three-hour surgery and repaired broken bones and ligaments, put in 15 stitches and sent him home.

The dog that was hit required $1,500 surgery to get him fixed back up, Johnston said.

The FWC officer joked that he considered writing the dog a ticket for accidentally discharging a firearm, but decided against it. He did note that while no law was broken, the hunters were fortunate there were no more serious injuries.

“It’s lucky that’s all that happened,” Johnston said. “It was just a fluke, just an unusual accident. What was unusual to me is that with a gun that’s on safety, it’s hard to pull the trigger. The dog had to step on it just right so that trigger would pull. It could have been more than one stepped on it.”

Ray, who works at Franklin Correctional Institution, is recovering well and is set to return to work March 1. “I’m doing fine, I’m doing good,” he said.

Ray, however, has received his fair share of ribbing from friends, including an imaginary voice message from Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

“’The dog’s shooting his pa,’ I had one my buddies say,” said Ray. “I had one tell me ‘That dog will hunt!’”