Talk about dedication

MONTANA
Sometimes you have to look a little silly to get the job done. It’s a risk Mark Renner, an avid bowhunter, was willing to take when he designed a hat to fool pronghorn antelope. The wily animals were always quick to flee once they spotted Renner standing up to shoot, so he tried outfitting a hard hat with real antelope horns. But the resulting headgear was too heavy, while the cloth horns he sewed onto a ball cap flopped over. Finally, reports Brett French in the Billings Gazette, Renner invented a hard polyurethane foam cap that resembles the entire head of a pronghorn and founded a Web site whose name reveals his invention’s purpose: BeTheDecoy.com. Renner’s father-in-law admits that wearing the hat “looks goofy” if you’re just standing around your truck, but out in the field, the disguise seems to fool the pronghorn. Even when the animals spotted him, he says, “they’d run only a few feet and then start feeding again.” Renner, who calls his $25 hat the SpeedGoat, says that with headgear under his belt, his next goal is to come up with a scent-free T-shirt and a face mask designed to look like a pronghorn.

WASHINGTON
Police responded recently to an unusual urgent call, reports the Seattle Times. Apparently thinking he was a ninja, a man had tried to leap over a 4- to 5-foot metal fence, but impaled himself instead. A police account dryly notes, “Clearly, he was overconfident of his abilities.” The man was taken to a nearby medical center.