Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game So, are black bears hard to kill are not?

Yep. Go back and look at the anatomy chart further up in this thread. Very little chest cavity at the shoulders and basically none in front. If you shoot a bear far enough forward to break the shoulder bone you have a good chance of missing the lungs if the bear is quartering to you a little. I made this mistake on the last day of my hunt in Alberta a couple of years ago. Early in the hunt I killed my first bear with a frontal shot at about 75 yards. The bear was on all fours and I put the 200 gr Partition from my 8mm mag under the chin and straight into the sternum. Instant collapse, not even a twitch.

The last day of the hunt we spotted a nice sized bear and put on a stalk. The shot was about 230 yards from a steady rest and I aimed right on the shoulder on what I assumed was a broadside bear. At the shot the bear tumbled down hill out of sight. My guide was watching through binocs and thought it might have been quartering to a little. We found a piece of shoulder bone and followed a blood trail (no bubbles, just bright red) for about 75 yards before it petered out. We searched for a couple of hours with no luck and finally spotted the bear in some alders. We couldn't be sure it was the same bear and it moved off into the alders. We went over and found some sign. It was indeed the same bear and it didn't look too awfully worse for the wear. That burned in my gut all year. I put the bullet right where I had aimed. I just aimed at the wrong spot.

The next year back in Alberta again I shot one broadside at about 80 yards. I held mid way up and a couple of inches behind the shoulder. After the 30 minute wait we found it stone dead about 75 yards away. My second bear was quartering to in thick cover and I broke the shoulder on that one on the way into the chest. He was DRT.

Bears more closely resemble a human on all fours than they do a deer or elk. Put a bullet where their lungs are and they will die. Put one in the guts and you might have an exciting track job through thick alders like we had on my friend's bear the first year. About 3 hours after the shot the guide spotted the bear still very much alive at 10 yards. My friend finished it off as I filmed over his shoulder. That was pretty crazy for a midwestern guy. A couple of years before that up in Ontario a friend from New York gut shot a bear and had to put a couple more arrows into it in the dark as it tried to come at him after the outfitter tracked it down. His eyes were as big as saucers and he was still shaking when he got back to camp.