ORIGINAL: Hotburn76
I just find it unreal when I hear all the shots being fired during Ohio's gun season and all the shoots taken at running deer after they miss the first time. I understand using one gun for two types of game. The only part of your post that I see alot of people doing is going after a deer to quickly. Alot of hunters loose deer every year cause they took up the chase to quickly. Alot of times deer will bed down in a short distance and die. But alot of hunters go after the deer and the the deer gets up and runs, sometimes a great distance and never found. I try to always wait one hour at a minimum before I start to track. This forum is clear full of post where a person says they were tracking the deer and then the blood just stopped. Alot of times I think when this happens is when the person spooked the deer and it took off full steam and the blood drops were just spread out to far and harder to find.
I understand the one gun thing, a tight budget is a hard thing to have as a hunter. Been there, done that!!
Tight budget sucks, but fortunately Mom and Dad came through huge with a new set of hunting clothes this past Turkey day for early Xmas!
I grew up in Mansfield, a little over an hour from Findlay, so I know all about some of the Ohio deer hunters. We hunted on an 8 acre plot my Dad owns, and we would alwasy talk over lunch and at the end of the day about the incredible amount of 3-5 shot bursts we heard that more than likely either resulted in a total miss or a wounded deer with a lot of running left in it. Fortunately Ohio went to the required plug law where you can only have the 1 in the magazine and 2 in the chamber which should help this somewhat. Having now hunted deer in Iowa and Minnesota as well, Ohio is not alone in having the guys who "know" that they can hit a running deer with at least 1/5 shots!
On the letting the deer go for a while, I hunt public land that is pretty heavily hunted, and I don't know or particularily trust anyone who hunts there. This year I shot a doe at about 80 yards. I knew I had a good shot on her and she ran about 20 yards before going down with blood visibly spurting the whole way. I went to her about 15 min after she went down. As I got closer to her, I saw another hunter walking towards her looking around. By the time I got to her, he was about 20 yards away and still heading towards her. When I got there, he asked me "Did you shoot that deer?"
When I said I did, he got a disappointed look on his face and turned the other way.
I would like to think he wasn't going to try to steal someone else's deer, but I definitely have my doubts. I should add at this point that unless someone else fired at the exact moment I did, there were no other shots fired in my immediate vicinity for 40 minuts after my shot, so there is no way he shot it too.
So basically, I try to get to my deer as soon as possible within reason as a means of defending my kill. Sounds pretty primitive, but based on some of the idiots out there, I think it's a legit worry.