Original mez, thank you for this post mez.




Here is the picture, study it well. The no man's land exists but NOT in the deer's chest cavity. The lungs fill the entire thoracic cavity. Before someone jumps in and says but I dressed a deer and there was a bunch of space around the lungs............ Yes there was and always will be. The lungs work in a negative pressure environment, atmospheric pressure in the chest is lower than that outside. Take away negative pressure and the lungs immediately collapse and will not reinflate, hence the term collapsed lung. As soon as you enter the chest via the diaphragm or though the chest wall they deflate and appear much smaller than in a live scenario. The only way to see the lungs in their natural state is with and ultrasound or CT scan. There is no space between them and the chest wall.

To answer the original question, you can absolutely hit a deer through both backstraps and not kill it, knock it down or even hurt it badly. I would guess about 99% of the shots where people say I shot right under the spine and above the lungs actually was above the spine and through the backstrap. How this happens, look at the picture above, the blue line denotes the path of the spinal cord, it travel within the vertebral body in the vertebral canal, totally encased in bone. Each vertebrae has what is called a dorsal spinous process, these are the bones you see sticking up along the top of the spine in the picture. In the cervical and lumbar spine these are very short. In the thoracic spine they are long, 6-8 inches in a mature buck. The backstraps, composed of the epaxial muscle group attatch to these processes. In the picture, essentiall everything above the blue line (spine) is backstrap and dorsal spinous process, you can even see the top of the shoulder blade overlies this area. If you hit a deer high near the shoulder you will go through both backstraps, maybe or maybe not break a dorsal spinous process and exit with the deer basically unharmed. Make sense?

For you guys that dress your own, this fall after you remove the front legs and take off the backstraps take a look at these bones sticking up off of the indiviual vertebrae. You will see what I'm talking about. Take a pair of pliers and break a couple off, it won't open up the vertebral canal and you won't be able to see the spinal cord.