Originally Posted by
tazmaniac_37752
...The last several deer I have killed has been with a neck shot, that way if i miss i have missed, if I hit that neck the deer isn't going to run off die and be wasted or run off and be shot up for the next person or be all crippled up! It's gonna be dead pretty close to where it was standing whenI shot!
I'm not a big fan of neck shots. Yes, a bullet hitting a neck vertebrae will probably sever the spine and essentially make an instant kill, with very little meat loss.
However, a bullet through the windpipe will probably look like a miss, and there's a good chance the animal will run off and suffer a lingering death.
I once processed a whitetail buck that I had killed, and when I was cutting off the neck meat I found a jacketed .35 caliber bullet lodged against a neck bone. The deer had been shot at least a year previously, as the neck muscles had completely healed, and other than the bullet, there was not any other indication that the deer had been shot.