Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting hunting with 00 buckshot?

as previously posted by others, a responsible
hunter would pattern their shotgun (or any firearm)with the
ammo they intended to use, and wouldn't use anything
with a less than optimal pattern. folks that would
just fling lead would likely do so no matter what
firearm they were holding at the time.
myself, i've killed several with regular old cheap
buckshot, mostly on days that were full of east Texas
fog and at close range. the first one i killed on my
own place was killed during a fog so thick that a rifle
with the most expensive of scopes would have been useless.

You realize you replied to a 5 year old thread don't you?
(I'm guessing you don't)

I hunted deer this way for many years. It's still legal here and many people still do it on large acreages. It's more of a social event than anything else. You spend most of your time hunting dogs, not deer. Or that use to be the case anyway. I haven't hunted that way for many years and have no desire to go back to it, but I did have a lot of fun doing it. I usually kept 2 guns in my pickup, a shotgun with buckshot for the close in fast shots and a rifle for the long shots across bean fields. Killed a lot of deer that way and did my part to keep the dog food companies in business as well.

Good thread, huh?

It's not as old as you though, huh?

Sorry cap. I never saw more than 3 or 4 hunters posted less than several hundred yards apart and generally seperated by ridges between draws in thick woods.

With respect to the years ago rarity of hunters shot by hunters while hounding deer im guessing youre posting bs and question your drink. I only hunted with real woodsmen however rather than with city slicker sound shooters.

No man i ever hunted with ever shot anything or at anything not normally for the table on a hunt for wild game.

Im sorry to hear of the existence of 'hunters' you associated with.

Ohio was shotgun only and slug or sabot only,(for deer) until the last few years. Rifle is new to this state, so I could not justify a new hunting rifle on a single income.
00 Buck is in the shotgun above the door, but never used on deer. I am, however, quite at home with a shotgun.
I can't say how it will work on deer, but it put a feral dog down like his strings had been cut.

One group did venture into our camp one evening years ago when timberland was open to one and all, to have a drink and spread bs, i guess. Around the campfire they asked my dad how he dared hunt in the old ww2 camo and if he wasnt afraid of someone throwing a 'sound shot' his way.

He replied that bullets could fly two directions and they had best be behind a big tree if they fired in his direction.

That cooled the campfire discussion that night.

Kellory, many deer run a good way after being hit with buckshot ahead of hounds. Thing is, hounds dont leave the track after the shot. If a dog can run a trail on the scent from a track, their z
ability is not diminished by the presence of blood on it.

I don't doubt it. I've seen what dogs can do, and trained more than a few. Trained a Golden to track my kids on command.
Nearly all forms of hunting are on my bucket list.

I have killed one deer with 00 buckshot, and I was underwhelmed.

A smallish fork horn blacktail stood broadside to me at 32 yards with his head turned toward me. I aimed at his inside eye, which was almost aligned with his shoulder, and fired a 2 34 inch 12 gauge shell with 9 rounds of 00 buck. I expected to hit him in the head and shoulder/chest. Two balls hit the deer and the other 7 missed entirely. One went through the top of his shoulder blades on both sides, above the spine. The other hit low in his ribs, neither making much of a wound channel as both pushed through to the hide on the off side.

He went down but was awakening when I reached him so I shot him again under the ear, expecting massive damage and perhaps severing his neck. He dropped his head at the shot but there was no sign of a wound! Then a few drops of blood began to seep from the neck hair. The 2 1/2 inch wide wound area was exactly as if I had jabbed his neck nine times with a school pencil. The 00 shot were mostly stopped against the spinal bones, and the spine was not severed at all.

If I ever hunt with a shotgun again for deer, I will use a round with many more pellets to fill in the wide empty parts of the pattern, and # 4 buck is what my Texas friends have recommended.

I live in a special regulations area of Pennsylvania where no rifles are allowed for hunting. I have hunted here a few times (normally I go to the mountains) and have taken a few deer with 00 buckshot. It will drop them in their tracks at close range but I would be very careful about range. I use a full choke and wouldn't shoot beyond about 35-40 yards. If you pattern a shotgun carefully, you might find that you can extend that range but it is a close-range load. If you want to shoot over 50 yards, you would be better off shooting a rifled slug out of that smooth bore.

That should say you personally don't know anything....

How hard is it to kill a deer? 22 rimfires work just fine.... there is a lot more to killing deer than what weapon/ammo you use.

Especially if you've killed a few with lead 2s in short 12 ga shells....

I didn't read all of this, but I knew guys who shot deer in the old days with buckshot.. They like # 1 or #2..

Each gun is different , some pattern smaller buckshot best. Other guns will shoot the bigger pellets best , I have used most sizes except 000 . THey all work within reason . Just shoot it with several choke tubes and see what works best. 12 ga #6 shot will work at the right range. Last several times i've used 00 out of a Bps 10 ga. 50 yds put 11 pellets in a deer chest.

I've only seen one deer shot with 00 buck in my life. Killed it deader than shyt instantly. Range was about 25 yards. Pellet hits in shoulder, ribs and base of neck.

I want to say up front that I have never shot at a deer with buckshot. I have never hunted in a state that allowed it. I don't, therefore, want to be mistaken for an expert on this. I also don't want this to seem like I'm knocking buckshot or its use on Whitetails.

What I do know about it is that before the advent of modern seasons, buckshot was very popular for deer. A lot of that popularity came from cultural inertia. Folks had been spraying shot at Whitetail deer since white men set foot on the continent. At moderate ranges it worked, at least by the standards of the time. What were those standards? In general, the mindset of an early 19th Century Whitetail hunter was to put a ball into the deer any way he could and then put the dogs on it. One shot was generally not expected to bring down an animal. Often the finisher was delivered with a knife.

Even with the advent of centerfire rifle, no one really changed their way of looking at things. Teddy Roosevelt writes about putting 13 rounds into a single doe in a long pursuit after putting the first round into her rump while on a meat hunt out West. No, he wasn't using buckshot. However, he was sort of simulating it. Nobody was really planning about dropping a Whitetail on the first shot, or at least they were not expecting it.

That kind of mindset was even in Jack O'Connor's earlier work, and you can see it in the whole "Brush Busting" mindset. Folks were encouraged to shoot at whatever part of the animal was sticking out of cover, or to even shoot through heavy cover to reach it. The idea was still to put a ball in to get a blood trail and then track the animal until you could put in a finisher.

I've got stuff on my shelf from the Thirties and Forties extolling the use of buckshot out to 80 yards. Now, you folks that are experienced with buckshot can tell me: 80 yards with buckshot? What would you expect the outcome to be? I'm not knocking buckshot, mind you. I'm just saying the mindset of these hunters was considerably different from today's "One-shot/One-kill" view of things.

If you look at the responses on this thread, they pretty well match what I've been hearing from folks for the past 40 years. At what most people consider to be bow hunting ranges, buckshot is just as effective as any other round. The results are highly variable, shotgun by shotgun and load by load. Some wouldn't trust buck past 30 yards. Some trust it out past 50. YMMV-- in this case there is an emphasis on the "V." What you find is that the further out you go, folks' expectations change, and their idea of acceptable losses due to wounding goes up.

These ideas all die hard. Did you ever wonder why a quintessential "hunting knife" was so long, when it's so unwieldy up inside a Whitetail? The reason, in part, is that hunters needed a long blade to reach the vitals. In the autobiography of Mishack Browning, he discusses his favorite method of dispatching a buck was to mount the wounded animal and ride it while plunging his knife into the vitals. The idea of slitting a deer's throat? That's only effective if the animal is still alive. I would also warn that early hunting memoirs discussed how wolf packs followed the hunters, living off the leavings and running down the woundings, often in concert with the hunter's own dogs.

Is buckshot effective against a Whitetail? Yes, especially if you expect to be hopping on its back to finish it off. I'm not knocking the practice. I'm just saying know what you're getting yourself into.

I have a lot of experience with buckshot. After quite a bit of experimenting, I have a setup I trust out to 70 yards. My Super Black eagle will put 16 00s into 20" at 60 yards every time.

I only remember one I had to finish killing with a knife. I had shot him high with a .270 breaking his back.

80 yds no , not saying it can't be done but that's more luck than anything. I have a 10 gauge BPS that I'm confident up to 60. Though I prefer 40 and under.

in the foxfire#5 book, one of the folks that was
interviewed in one of the hunting chapters spoke
of his shotgun's ability to put all of the pellets
of a buckshot round into the same hole at 100 yards.
i'd have to see that with my own eyes. i'd believe
maybe a half a dozen or so pellets at 60 or 80 with
modern chokes and ammo, but not in the same hole.
i'm hesitant past 50 with my equipment and ammo
with what testing i've done. i can say any deer
i've shot with buckshot were recovered and didn't
need a finisher, bullet or blade.

It's funny you mention the .270. I went looking for a discussion of buckshot, and found the following in an Outdoor Life Cyclopedia from 1942:



What's interesting is the surrounding text was criticizing the .270 WIN as creating too much meat damage.