Importance of Shot Placement vs Power

[Sniperdoc]

If you hunt a lot it will happen to you!
I had a friend of mine claim a buck I shot. I let him have the deer. He hadn't taken a deer all season and I had. I shot the deer and the deer ran up a hill and just stood there and was bleeding out. The dee`r was less than 50 yards from where I was standing and my friend shot my deer? He told me he had never seen so much blood spatter when he shot the deer. I reckon so with his chest full of blood already?

I've heard of people who say that the last person who shoots the deer owns it, but I've never personally known it to happen

 

[longcruise]

My uncle shot a nice doe on a high ridge and it fled down the side to the bottom. He made his way down there and found a couple of non res southern boys standing by his deer . They asked him if it was his deer. He thought about the uphill drag and then downhill to camp. He says "no, it's not mine, you guys should take it, there doesn't seem to be anyone around claiming it. Shame for it to go to waste." He headed back up the ridge while they happily got to field dressing. So, sometimes it's just not that important.

 

[SOLANCO]

Shot placement and your shooting ability go hand in hand. Accuracy is everything..!

Almost everything. Do not take iffy shots. Have a good sight picture on vital organs. Anything less disrespects the game and the hunt and you.

 

[longcruise]

Kinda reflecting on the topic title. Placement is always important but lacking adequate power as in projectile size and speed for the specific game can make the perfect shot placement a runner that may never been recovered. Experienced ml hunters know what is adequate for the game they hunt and overkill is never a mistake IMO.

 

[mikesto44]

Everyone needs to know there limitations. Also by what I've seen in over 60 + years. Most people can't track a wounded animal. There idea of accuracy isn't what it should be. Nor do they really understand where the vitals are on the game there after.
Last but not least there shooters not hunters. We all owe it to the animal to kill it quickly.

 

[smokepolehall]

I shot a nice fat nanny one morning high in the lungs. She ran down the hollow by my friend, he shot at her running n took out a foot n she went down. I walked up as he shot her in the head n he says how do you like my Doe ? I said much better when you get her gutted n up to the cabin. You could see the pass through in lungs but he needed a deer & I had plenty in the freezer from archery season.

 

[Steve Wagner]

The thing most hunters lack is good tracking skills, and knowledge of the game they hunt.

This is true waksupi, and it starts with some ancient advice I got from one of my brothers years ago. "After the shot, do not go to where you 'think' you saw your animal go. You may have seen another animal fleeing the area. Go to exactly where it was when you took the shot, mark that spot, and start tracking from there." You don't want to push a wounded animal immediately anyway. And you won't catch up to a poorly hit animal by running after it. Look for a hair ball, from an exit, at the site. If there is a confusing amount of tracks, do expanding concentric circles around your marked spot until you find some blood. If you don't mark your spot, especially in snow and/or heavy woods, your old tracks will start to confuse you when trying to sort things out. Old snow [granulated] is your tracking friend if there is blood, as it will really show up. Deeper powder snow can be a problem as blood will mostly drop right through it. Follow the most recent looking tracks. Especially ones that look frantic. High shoulder and back shots can take long distances to show blood. It is draining into the body cavity. Don't expect blood at point of shot, and don't assume a miss if you don't find it for quite a few yards.
If you see stomach matter or feces in the blood, you probably have a mess on your hands, unless it was a frontal or quartering to shot. The gut shot can still creates Ungulate Depression and the beast will try to bed down. Follow up.
Deer can, and will jump 20 feet or more upon being hit, so there usually isn't a magic pool of blood evidence right where it was standing.
I once completely disconnected the heart of a whitetail buck and it jumped right over the fence it was standing next to. It ran 25 yards before any blood showed up. It was leakage. He collapsed at 40 yards The blood pressure gauge was at zero. His heart was rolling around in his chest like a tennis ball. SW

 

[Steve Wagner]

What shots will drop an animal in its tracks with 100% certainty? The only two I know of are a head or spine shot and a head shot is risky. The high shoulder spine shot is a good one that will drop an animal in its tracks and unless it's too high will still be in the kill zone. I've seen several deer with a blown up heart take off on a dead run for 50 yards or more before falling over.

Crisco, there also seems to be some kind of nerve mass in ungulates etc. between the heart and lungs that regulates those organs and others. Like the point of our chin, a solid hit there will often, but not always, knock an animal out. It will usually die from blood loss before it can try to get up. Many videos show this happening, and to the surprise of the shooter, an animal will occasionally get up after a few seconds and try to run off, only to tip over in a few more yards.
Nathan Foster at Terminal Ballistics has written quite a bit about this shot, and it usually requires the wound channel of unmentionable rifles, velocities and projectiles. I have been able to drop a number of animals this way. Not yet with an ML, but I am working on it. SW

 

[Steve Wagner]

I shot a nice fat nanny one morning high in the lungs. She ran down the hollow by my friend, he shot at her running n took out a foot n she went down. I walked up as he she her in the head n he says how do you like my Doe ? I said much better when you get her gutted n up to the cabin. You could see the pass through in lungs but he needed a deer & I had plenty in the freezer from archery season.

Smokie, one of my brothers put a kill shot on a deer that ran over a small hill into a centerfire massacre of several hunters. The deer looked like swiss cheese. A young boy ran up and exclaimed, "I got him". "You sure did" my brother said, "Nice shot !". SW

 

[Nuthatch]

I think we're all pretty well in agreement that shot placement and adequate power are both important to varying degrees. But I find it to be nearly impossible to quantify the power component. In my experience, energy is a rather useless metric. People use it because it's an easy metric and one printed on boxes and ballistic charts. In other words, I feel it's a lazy metric and not a very good one either. It tells me absolutely nothing important for decision-making purposes. Alas, delivering killing shots on animals is more akin to art than science. It involves science but the execution (pun intended) is more art.

For bullets and blades (arrows), diameter, mass and velocity tell me far more important things. Of the three, I'd compromise on velocity first in favor of mass and diameter. Velocity doesn't even do much until we're north of about 2400 fps. Below that, it's still more about mass & diameter. Structural integrity is another component but a fuzzy one depending on what is desired (expansion or cutting diameter vs penetration). Personally, I'd rather have all of my hunting shots be pass-throughs without exception.

 

[waksupi]

You all may want to look at Fackler's wound assessment studies.

 

[Sparkplug]

I think we're all pretty well in agreement that shot placement and adequate power are both important to varying degrees. But I find it to be nearly impossible to quantify the power component. In my experience, energy is a rather useless metric. People use it because it's an easy metric and one printed on boxes and ballistic charts. In other words, I feel it's a lazy metric and not a very good one either. It tells me absolutely nothing important for decision-making purposes. Alas, delivering killing shots on animals is more akin to art than science. It involves science but the execution (pun intended) is more art.

For bullets and blades (arrows), diameter, mass and velocity tell me far more important things. Of the three, I'd compromise on velocity first in favor of mass and diameter. Velocity doesn't even do much until we're north of about 2400 fps. Below that, it's still more about mass & diameter. Structural integrity is another component but a fuzzy one depending on what is desired (expansion or cutting diameter vs penetration). Personally, I'd rather have all of my hunting shots be pass-throughs without exception.

But power is a figure calculated from mass and velocity. I wouldn't shoot a deer with a 64 cal rb fired from a slingshot. Nor would I use a .25 fired from an airgun. It takes any mass moving at the right velocity (minimum FPE) to get the needed penetration for any shot. So, rather than a useless metric, I would consider it a variable that needs to be known. Lighter needs to be faster. Heavier can be slower. But you need to ensure the gun is capable of the minimum FPE (aka- power) needed to achieve the minimum penetration required for the desired shot.

Comparing arrows to bullets are like apples to oranges. They perform in different ways.

I will agree though, that shot placement is an art.