Well, selection of a piss poor broadhead would be the shooters fault I guess. Some are junk... no two ways about it. The tried and true few should be first on everyones list. We never hear repeated bad stories of Thunderheads or Muzzy etc(except Bowdacious and his latest hunt). There have been more wounding stories on the internet this year than I ever remember seeing and the season is young. Folks may be able to smoke dots, 3D animals and targets but there seems to be an awful lot of choking going on in the tree tops or people are pushing the limits of their abilities. It only takes a minute to think first, but days to get over the heart ache. I see all kinds of people tell of searching for a day or 2 for a wounded deer with several friends... well I think they' re just walking and not tracking a lot of time. Maybe the internet has given people a false sense of I' m the great white hunter, or maybe the 3D ranges have.... there seems to be a lot of floundering going on with all the buzz words used but a lot of unrecovered deer. I' m not going to say it hasn' t happened to me, but if you put an arrow in the rib cage the deer should be found a whole lot more often than not. How does that saying go about walk the walk and talk the talk and all that stuff. We need less walkin' and talkin' and more slowing down and doing.

It doesn' t make you any more a great white hunter to add your name to the shot, hit and lost list. It' s OK not to take a shot or to miss altogether. You' re just a failure which can be rectified with one clean shot the next day. Stacking up and bragging on wounded and lost figures puts you on the list of Blooming Yahoo Failures.

I agree 100%.

A common theme I see in all of these lost deer threads is in the abondonment of the blood trail. IMO there is always more blood somewhere and 100% of the effort should be on relocating and following the blood trail - as dismal and hard a task it may be. It is almost always the best chance of finding a deer.

Once the 4 friends are called you know the trail is soon forgotten and the " search is on.

I think the trail is lost - an hour is spent trying to find it - then 5 hours spent " looking" for white.

Looking for " white" to me is the last and worst option a tracker should take.

I would take 4 hours on my knees looking for one drop of blood - over 10 hours of looking for the deer any day.

JMO

How can we expect a lot of " hunters" to make a good shot when they have so many problems selecting proper draw length and obtaining correct form? The thread that I put up a while back about ' The Tuning Trilogy' is the prerequisite for shot placement. IF ' we' teach someone to pick/hit a spot, without proper equipment/archer ' detailing' , they' re not going to be able to " place the shot on the spot" .

Then we' ve got to teach them how to properly track. Just the other evening I was teaching another hunter this aspect. When to start tracking, when to stop tracking and how to look for the proper signs - it' s all part of the process of hunting.

So, " Don' t blame it on the broadhead" because it' s the leading edge of the ' system' . You might want to examine the entire ' system' . Most of today' s broadheads, fixed or mechanical, will do a great job if you' ve got the other parts of the ' system' ' in line' .

Eastwood, if you choose the equipment and it all matches correctly, it is all quality equipment and you have a quality broadhead not a Wally World special, you tell me how often you have heard folks say, my string broke, my riser broke or my release broke? What I have seen is 99.999999% of the time is statements like " I hit it a little high/low/back/forward" " I clipped a branch" " I thought I had a perfect hit, then when we finally recovered it, it turned out I had hit it to high/low/forward/back than I thought it hit" .

Eastwood I challenge you or anyone else to find me one thread where a hunter using quality, properly maintained equipment lost a deer due to it breaking/malfunctioning. No I will not be able to back that figure up with a study, but common sense tells me and most folks that most lost deer and bad hits are the hunters fault and not the equipments. Unless the hunter doesn' t maintain his gear or is buying the cheapest equipment he can get.

Take it from one who has gone down the hyper-fast " high tech" trail, full size arrows, good solid broad heads and @ 250 fps and you won' t be cussing your equipment when the time comes to make a shot.

I' ve lost deer to poor penetration and erratic flight of light set-ups. Contrast that to the 230lb. buck I shot quartering to and hit the heavy bone of the shoulder. The muzzy sheared off a blade, the arrow bent but it still exited and the deer died within sight. This was a case of good equipment making up for what could be considered a bad decision on my part.