med358-boise
Well-Known Member
I am perplexed to what appears to be a very inconsistent application of logic. It seems that there is a non-trivial set of posts that revolve around a similar theme of:
"I shot one deer in X spot at Y distance with Z bullet out of W cartridge and the deer ran XX yards before dropping and/or with little blood trail. I need a better bullet."
What is perplexing is that I suspect the majority of the posters recognize:
1) A single occurrence of any event is pretty dang close to meaningless - an inch difference in point of impact or a small change in bullet path on a quartering animal can make a tremendous difference in internal damage and speed of collapse.
2) Game animals are subject to similar physiological responses to pain such as adrenaline as humans are. There are many incidents of humans enduring severe wounds and continuing to function and fight.
3) Individual animals within a species (just like humans) have different physiological make-ups: some have tougher hides, stronger bones, more elastic soft tissue. Anybody who watches football will see one player take a tremendous hit to the head get up and walk way and another take a much less hit and have a concussion or human diseases have different survivability rates.
Granted, every hunt is precious and nobody ever wants to lose even a single animal but there are a lot of variables in play that determine animal reaction and survivability other than the bullet's performance. There are several scientific studies on different mammals on responses to pain, stress, and loss of blood.
One interesting study was performed on pigs where 7 of the 20 pigs died from the same induced and then treated hemorrhaging but there was no correlation between the heart rate metrics during hemorrhaging and survivability.
"I shot one deer in X spot at Y distance with Z bullet out of W cartridge and the deer ran XX yards before dropping and/or with little blood trail. I need a better bullet."
What is perplexing is that I suspect the majority of the posters recognize:
1) A single occurrence of any event is pretty dang close to meaningless - an inch difference in point of impact or a small change in bullet path on a quartering animal can make a tremendous difference in internal damage and speed of collapse.
2) Game animals are subject to similar physiological responses to pain such as adrenaline as humans are. There are many incidents of humans enduring severe wounds and continuing to function and fight.
3) Individual animals within a species (just like humans) have different physiological make-ups: some have tougher hides, stronger bones, more elastic soft tissue. Anybody who watches football will see one player take a tremendous hit to the head get up and walk way and another take a much less hit and have a concussion or human diseases have different survivability rates.
Granted, every hunt is precious and nobody ever wants to lose even a single animal but there are a lot of variables in play that determine animal reaction and survivability other than the bullet's performance. There are several scientific studies on different mammals on responses to pain, stress, and loss of blood.
One interesting study was performed on pigs where 7 of the 20 pigs died from the same induced and then treated hemorrhaging but there was no correlation between the heart rate metrics during hemorrhaging and survivability.
