Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Bowhunting Big game will to live or mental toughness to survive

One thing for sure is you cannot predict with certainty the quality of the blood trail nor the distance of the run with any broadhead ( or bullet). There are certainly better and worse choices and those choices which are odds on favorites to provide better than average results.

However....... nothing with this endeavor is a guarantee, or even a certainty all the time. I'm a very big fan of the slick trick, never had a blade break, never had a weird flyer, never had anything to complain about. This is all true but still, does not explain the 50-60 yards without a drop of blood before you find a gushing trail a blind man with a stick could follow. Having had to track many hundreds or a thousand animals in my life for my living, this can also be stated with bullets and firearms. There is a common situation where the speed of departure of the animal and the beginning of blood to flow heavily are not in sync. Quite often I see the delay of blood flow by 6-10 seconds. In this timeline, a hoofed animal can travel 100 yards easily, maybe 200! An Olympic sprinter does 100 meters in 9 plus seconds. A punctured scared hoofed animal will easily cover that ground and often much more.

Habitat and species can contribute to this distance. A whitetail buck in the thickest of brush my stop as he is secure and hidden. Then try to figure out what's wrong. At which point it lies down or falls dead.

A cow elk or any of the antelope species in South Africa will run to stay with the herd well past any logical means of staying alive. They may run full out on pure adrenaline without any blood flow for 60-100 meters,....or more before finally falling. This makes tracking very complicated with the hundreds of tracks and no blood.

A Whitetail shot exactly the same in an open pasture VS one in the thickest of forests will react much differently simply because of the habitat, not the shot placement, the power of the bow, or the type of broadhead. The game has an astonishing mental capacity and will to travel to a comfortable safe place before stopping. This can be commonly witnessed shooting deer in pastures where they run quite a distance to be found dead just inside the bush or treeline.

At times the injury or the will to live is not equal between animals of the same species. They run and just fall dead, or decide to give up lay down and simply expire. When we see this, it's often assumed that the type of equipment is the winning combination. When it might have been the lack of that specific animal to fight for its life.

I've seen both African Antelopes and American deer species ( moose, elk, and deer) rutting and fighting, or coming into a call full of fight and aggression. When shot they stand and stare at you, or walk off and circle around with relative calm. I've seen elk trot away after being shot, and then with a cow call turn around and come back to the hunter again! Under almost any other circumstance these animals after being shot would have run for the hills and died someplace along the way. Yet a full penetration of a broadhead through the chest with visible blood pumping out of the slice seems to have no ill effect. At that moment of adrenaline and all the other high-performance additives coursing through their veins..... they seem to be bulletproof!

I was in the same place many of you are,..... at one time. My assumptions were all mechanically based almost mathematical in nature to determine the performance of equipment on game animals. I arrived in this more accurate place of my opinions only because of the pure volume of game animals I've seen shot and killed, or in some cases escape. We almost all tend to view ourselves as being at fault for lost game, and any failure to find the game we shoot. We then over scrutinize our gear choices as they must be to blame or somehow fall short of the performance needed. Many, myself included begin to second guess our own skills.

It's because of this that there are so many archery companies. They are all marketing to us, to show how they have solved the problems for us all, finding the best way of dropping game quickly. This so we never lose another animal again. It's not the gear, it's not the archer, it's not the species. It's more often the mindset of that specific animal at that exact moment. It's personality to put it in a human context. Look at this with humans. There are people if left to survive in a problem situation that are mentally tough enough to get through the process and others that would fold and quit or die without giving their all. Hell week for the Navy Seals and the Coastguard are perfect examples. Our Military leaders know this about people. Regardless of the physical strength or stamina, not all people have the mental will to overcome horrible conditions and survive. These guys are pushed well beyond the limits of normal human judgment to see just who is qualified to carry on. Olympic athletes are another great example. They greatly exceed anything a normal recreational athlete can manage.

Why should we believe for a second that game animals are any different? They all have variable physical characteristics that make them look different, why not mental differences as well. We all know that dogs personalities are vastly different, right? Why would we assume a big game animal after being shot would have the same exact will to survive and live?

So stop beating yourself and your equipment up. If you have done your part to practice and learn this skill. Then using sound judgment for range and angle. This is all any of us can hope for. Make the good shot, and believe in that after you do. The animal will die. You cannot know it's will to live ahead of time. Some will run like the wind, some will fold up. There are a lot of variables involved in this. I write this after having to console countless clients after the loss of an animal with a seemingly perfect shot. There will be failures and losses, it's part of the challenge we face. It's also why we must be patient and disciplined!

After many years of killing deer with a rifle after killing a couple with a bow I have reverted to killing them with a bow again, crossbow, but still a bow.

With a rifle, I shoot about 1/3-1/2 of them CNS because it's fast, clean and Bambi obliges. the 1/2-2/3 that are not CNS tend to be heart shots because the heart sits down at the bottom of the chest and blood leaks are generally excellent.

I have a situation in which I get to pick my crossbow shots and a rifle accurate crossbow. I started by waiting for a dead on facing shot and putting the arrow in just above the sternum. That puts it right through the heart and out near the umbilicus. It's a very quickly fatal shot. The problem is that it tends to produce a sparse initial blood trail because the omentum tends to plug the exit wound and the heart is no longer pumping, but rather fibrillating due to the damage.

This year I started shooting just lungs with a NAP Double Cross four blade head. I chose the four blade head because the crossbow gives me power to throw in the toilet and I wanted to see what a lot more damage to lungs could do. Just into the experiment a couple of animals, I found a couple of surprising things. The blood trails started much faster than normal, and were virtually identical. The deer both were reduced to walking after maybe twenty-thirty yards and down dead at fifty. The heart was untouched and after the shot it would have been beating at close to 200 BPM. That bigger entrance and exit hole combined with the initial damage to the lungs probably explains the earlier initial blood trail. The nasty damage to the lungs combined with the high heart rate and undamaged heart pumped the chest full, pressurizing it and collapsing the lungs completely. Obviously, with the chest pressurized the blood trail is much improved.

The two deer had so much lung damage that my wife while holding the light while I gutted them noticed as soon as I opened the chest. I have seen rifles do less damage.

The testing I have done indicate to me that you probably need 250 FPS and 400 grains to drive a 2 inch expandable through a deer decently. Hit more bone and/or take shots that need a longer distance and you need more power. For 4 blades, that might need a lot more. I am using 300 FPS and 500 grains, so that is a big help.

My experience over 60 years has been very few animals bedded down after I have shot them. Adrenaline charged or not. I have always been extremely careful with shot placement and lay the results off to that. They lay down to die. I don't even remember the last one I put the first hole in that didn't tip over and die instead of lay down.

Very nice article sir, thank you.