deroche117

These are my personal thoughts only... There is no replacing shot placement as the most important thing you can do.

A lot of people aim for and shoot through the shoulder as a way to break an animal down and anchor the animal where it was shot. Most often this works very well.

I really prefer to shoot in behind the shoulder putting the bullet in the vitals. At this point different bullets do different things. My goal in making this shot is to create enough 'tramatic' shock to the animal that actually over-rides the animals 'flight' response system and stops them from running.

I prefer a bullet that enters in behind the shoulder passes through the vital area and exits out the other side. And oddly enough the size of the exit hole is not a key factor. The key is what does it do on the way throught the vital area. I want a bullet that passes through and creates enough 'hydrostatic shock' that it destroys the organs in the vitals whether the organs are directly hit or not. If this happens you create the 'tramatic shock' that I am referring to.

Here is a picture of the vital area...



I want to destroy the ALL organs in this area. The animal then knows there is a huge problem and the 'flight' response often fails.

For me the bullet that does this to a whitetail is a Nosler .451/260 grain Partition HG and I believe the new bullet (Lehigh .40/200 or .252/250) that I am using this year will do the same thing.

Here is a recovered Nosler... Nothing spectacular at all. The bullet passed through expanded to it's max and then contiued out the animal. What you do not see is as it passed through the vitals it turned everything in the cavity to 'red jello' There was a small piece of the heart left - but that was it. The animal went about 10' and collapsed.




Hope this makes some sense to you - but it works for me...

There are a lot of bullets out there that will accomplish this, a couple of examples are the:
Noslers - already mentioned
Speer Gold Dots
Barnes Bullets
Lehigh Bullets
and some others

But also there are a lot of bullets out there that under perform or do not perform the same consistently.