To answer the original question, I have had a bee in my bonnet for quite some time over the over-exposure of the TC Encore on TV. For one thing, it ain't particularly my taste in rifle. For another, it encourages this whole "one-shot-one-kill" idea in the extreme.
Now, mind you, I'm all for putting them down with one shot. Having said that, I always try to be ready for a second, or even a third shot if the situation arises. You would think that 1-s-1-k would be a humane way to go, but in reality it makes a lot of folks expect the animal to go down. They are not ready for the contingencies and the animal ends up suffering.
My feeling is that a lot of goobers see guys on TV shoot with a single-shot rifle and go out expecting the animal to die with only one shot, no matter what the reality is.
The most extreme example I can give of this is a response that I got a couple of years ago to a question regarding follow-up shots. Some fellow on a Kentucky hunting forum said that if he shot and the deer did not go down immediately, he would just figure it was time to give up hunting. I guess that's one way to get out of following a blood trail.
Right on!
Couple or three decades ago, a former friend gushingly volunteered that hunting with a single-shot was "more sporting" than hunting with a repeater. I'd heard that silly rationale before, and though I love single-shots as much as he does, I told him not to try to sell me that garbage.
"Nobody owes it to an animal to kill it � unless you've pushed a bullet or an arrow into it
and it doesn't die right away. Then you owe it to that animal to kill it as quickly as possible."
For years, I idolized a famous big-game hunter whom we don't hear anything about these days (appropriately). Had and cherished several of his books. Then I went (1955, 1956) to one of his lectures where he showed and narrated movies of his hunts. All was good � better than good � until he came to his leopard hunt.
He'd tethered a goat to a tree as bait for a leopard. He waited in a blind, Weatherby ready. A leopard came slinking to the tethered goat, which was making the expected motions and sounds of abject terror. Then the Mighty Hunter boasted of his cleverness.
He intentionally gut-shot the leopard to see what it'd do. As a south Alabama fox-hunter so eloquently put it later, "quicker'n seven gods can skin a minute," the leopard savaged the goat. The Mighty Hunter thought that that was funny. Let it go on for a while. Let the leopard kill the goat before he shot the leopard dead.
I didn't think that that was either clever or funny. I still don't. Threw his books away and never bought another � certainly not one of the signed copies that he was peddling at the lecture hall.
