Ever tried those shooting games at the arcade or in a carnival? There are many variations, but let’s focus for now on the kind that emulates clay-pigeon shooting. In the carnival, the gun used is a toy rifle or shotgun that uses pellets instead of bullets. For a small fee and a chance to win fancy stuffed animals, the player tries to shoot at non-living targets like plastic toy soldiers, ducks, life-sized pictures of gunmen, a plain bullseye. Arcade games have the same concept. If you ever played the games Duck Hunt and Hogan’s Alley, while the targets are flying ducks and human targets, the fact that they’re virtual targets still makes them non-living and inanimate. In both arcade and carnival games, they’re all an offshoot of clay pigeon shooting.
Clay pigeon shooting which is known formally as Inanimate Bird Shooting is the art and sport of shooting at specially designed flying targets called clay pigeons using a shotgun or any type of firearm. The clay pigeon targets are shaped like an inverted saucer, with fluorescent colors and made of pitch and pulverized limestone mixture. Clay pigeons conform to very exacting specifications in their weight and dimensions, which are set to conform to international standards of clay pigeon shooting.
The size of the targets varies differently, depending on various disciplines of clay pigeon shooting. The most common is the 108 mm size standard, used in American Trap, Skeet, and Sporting Clays. International disciplines utilize the slightly larger 110 mm size.