This may sound like a really stupid question, but what do you do after you shoot a deer? Growing up we would always immediately head over to where the deer was shot. Most of the time we had a good clean shot and the deer was down and the work began. Sometimes the deer was wounded and it would try to run away and 95%+ of the time we would shoot it again and kill it. Gut shot deer were always the ones that went the fartherest and fastest. I can recall 2 or 3 times when someone wounded a deer and it got away and we never found it.
I was watching some hunting shows the other day and it seems like the standard practice is to shoot the deer then sit around and talk for a 1/2 hour then go over to see if the deer is down or not. Is this just part of the show or is this standard practice for everyone? I can see that immediately going over to check it out could possibly spook a wounded animal and it would more likely run off vs. if you didn't immediately go over to check it out. I can also see that depending on how hard you hit it, a wounded animal could travel a long way in 1/2 hour and make it even harder to track down and find.
I also thought that this could be due to the fact that in most of these shows they are stand hunting and the deer might not know where they are when they shoot so it wouldn't know which way to run unless the huntershowed themselves. Generally they are also hunting in the woods so theycan't see whether the deer is running away or not. We grew up hunting the prarrie and most of the time it was easy to see if the deer was running away or if it was down, but in the shows, even if the deer goes down and stays down they often wait quite a while to go over to check it out.
I'm sure that we weren't the best hunters growing up, we mainly hunted to put meat on the table. It was not uncommon for us to come home from a day of hunting with quite literally a "truckload" of deer.
[EDIT] I changed the picture to a link instead of an embedded picture because some people found it offensive. It is literally a picture of a truckload of deer.[EDIT]
http://padens.com/files/truck_load_of_deer.jpg
Lots of rambling, but I just wanted to get some other opinions on this.
Thanks, Nathan