ORIGINAL: rybohunter

I didn’t read everything, so bear with my question, some may have already offered info.

Does anyone here have 1st hand experience with a deer shot thru the body/chest cavity and survived? Not none of this my buddy hit one and someone else killed it in gun season, or we saw it running around later on. I mean you physically saw with your own 2 eyes, the wounds or healed over scars thru the body of a deer, that were not fatal to it.



I’ve had 3 encounters like this. One I can say 100% that an arrow passed under the spine, level, at the very last couple ribs and did not kill the deer. It hit right thru the forward end of the inner tenderloins and had healed nicely from the outside, but when skinned you could see the hole. The buck was chasing does and acting normal when it was shot by my Dad.

Another encounter I’m not 100% sure about as it happened long ago, but at the time I remember the scars completely blew our minds as to how the deer had not died from them. It was a big old doe, that appeared to have been shot thru the chest, under the spine, just behind the flat part of the scapula. Now as time has passed, I can’t quite recall things as accurately as I once could, but I remember being rather certain at the time about it being under the spine, and should have hit the top front end of the lungs.

Another deer I killed had only one lung. It was the freakiest thing in the world. Reach in pull out lungs & heart & only one lung comes out! As it was, the other lung was about a fist sized ball of scar tissue, fused to the inner lining of the ribcage. The buck had an enormous scar on the front of his chest. I could not tell what made the wound, but the deer was alive and well and living off of one lung. I’d say the deer had been living that way for quite some time as the wound was completely healed, no scabs, just scars.