Out of the 70 or 80 Mule Deer and Blacktail bucks/does that I have killed I can remember two shots that I still remember to this day. One was a big doe at close range walking up a hill. I shot for her head and she went down DRT. As I walked over to her, she jumped up and ran downhill, with her lower jaw swinging as she ran. I gave up after several hours of trying to find her. The second was a small buck that I did not kill, but bounced one off of his forehead. I never found him and am sure he recovered. I swore NEVER to try a head shot again, and I haven't. And have encouraged others to do the same. As a final thought, 80% or more of the animals I have taken are from a sitting or prone position. I practice occasionally throughout the spring, summer, and fall, and am capable of frequent 4" groups at 300 yards, a lot smaller off of a bench. I have never lost an animal at medium range all of my losses have been under 200 yards.
You sound like an honest and ethical hunter by your description. You practice. You are proficient with your rifle. You adopt the most supported positions before taking a shot. But even you are willing to admit that you have had a very small percentage of hunts that didn't go as expected.
Those are the memories that stick with you. My friend John shot a deer we didn't recover last year. He had a clear broadside shot at under 100 yards using a .270. I used the same rifle to to take at least a dozen deer over the years. John didn't have tons of practice with that particular rifle, but he had fired five rounds into a nice group before we went hunting. He said he had a good shot on the vital area. The amount of blood at the spot where he fired made me confident the deer could not have gone more than 50 yards. I fully expected to find it at the bottom of the small gully just past where he shot it. We waited about 30 minutes, then started tracking it. We followed a strong blood trail for about 3/4 of a mile up and down some really tough terrain (we were going parallel to the top of the mountain, which meant going over numerous fingers and draws). Then the trail just stopped on top of one of the fingers. We marked the last point and started fanning out. No more blood. No sign of the deer. We checked every water source around. We followed every deer path in the area. We looked from roughly 11:00 AM to 6:00 PM. It was cold outside, so we spent the entire next day looking for it too, including back tracking along the original path. But we never found the deer. My buddy is still sick about that shot. I have no doubt that he feels that sick feeling in the pit of his stomach every time he thinks about hunting again. The whole experience sucked so hard for me that I am considering making my next dog a scent hound. The idea of leaving an animal to suffer and of wasting meat is abhorrent to me.
But the basic premise of this thread was attempting to assign a percentage to how comfortable you feel taking the shot. That's like trying to assign a percentage to "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt." There is no percentage associated with reasonable doubt. I don't think you can really express - at least not honestly - how confident you really are at the moment you take a shot. My experience has generally been that most people who are 100% confident of anything, are some combination of ignorant, stupid, arrogant, zealous, or dishonest. There are very few things in this world in which I have absolute faith (death, taxes, and the Government solution will make the problem worse, not better).
