Bud, if you are reading any of these last few pages, please know that I am not in anyway directing any criticisms to you or your client. That deer is dead and accounted for and it is in the history files as far as I'm concerned. I am just trying to take an objective look at the subject which apparently has been revived in this thread.
I read his stuff several years ago and I read it again. It is interesting and he makes some good points and has some good data.
Couple of peculiar points that seem strange to me. He spends time discrediting other peoples work because they are not scientific enough and then he follows right down the same path. I do not know if he thinks people are not smart enough to understand his own deviations from science or he just doesn't have the personal integrity to deal with things honestly.
The 10 second to death time he selects is artificial and allows him to make his second assumption which is that the bullet is placed in the chest cavity behind the shoulder. Thus he gets around the mechanical issue of having to break the shoulder bone and actually work with momentum and energy. It also allows him to make the assumption that a deers chest is uniform and close to the density of water and a fluid.. This allows him to go into fluid dynamics because now the deer is a uniform fluid mass instead of a heterogeneous assemblage of hide, bones, lung, air, blood and muscle.
The point I wonder about is that he is in the profession of designing body armor so he clearly knows the mechanical side of bullets and hard objects yet he studiously avoids it in his work. In the end, I concluded that what he really wanted was not a theory to explain bullets in animals but a theory to explain bullets in wet phone books. Thus we go back to the initial thought of why did he spend time running down other peoples work. None of the other people cared anything about wet phone books.
He spends a lot of time collecting a lot of good data on bullets and I learned some things from it but in my experience you just cannot ignore the bone structure of an animal (except for antelope).
BB, I sure cant argue with your comments and have no intention of trying. I referenced the articles to look at the subject in general as it applied to the original post... namely, a bullet that penetrated a deer without hitting any bone and that did not expand. In this case the bullet pierced the heart causing a fairly rapid death.
What I gleaned from the article is the definition and cause of rapid death. And a little more specifically, a general understanding of wound mechanics to include temporary and permenant wound channels and just what they are, what causes them and what their effects are.
This is in response to another member's apparent assertion that "all that matters is placement" (my paraphrase) I think it is a very over simplified and errant view, especially in the world of LR hunting. Bullet performance is a big part of the equation and that is why bullet manufactures go to such great lengths to produce performing bullets of various type and function.
I believe that if the subject deer of this thread had been hit in the lungs only, with a non-expanding bullet (6.5 mm in diameter), it would have left a very small permenant wound channel, resulting in a relatively slow loss of blood and little to no blood trail which would have disappeared very quickly as the wound clogged up. Of course this is all speculation, but I think it's very reasonable specualtion.
Hitting bone is a big variable in the equation and usually assists in incapacitation and bullet deformation. I am looking at the least common denominator of a clean entry and passage.
My approach to rifle hunting has always been to lean to a deep penetrating, reliable controlled expansion bullet placed through the lungs, and if no double lung shot is available the construction of the bullet gives me insurance of getting the job done. So far this approach has been very effective in my experience... not to say other approaches dont work. However, the approach of pin holing game because "placement trumps all" is a very poor one IME, especially at extended ranges where placement becomes very challenging, and a miscalc of 1 mph of wind can result in a 10" error of POI.
Yeah, we can look at the pics and say, "dead deer"... but there are no pics of the ones that dont get found and we seldom here of those stories....
I digress....
