Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting From another site, re: lethal elk shots and "dead zone" above lungs

I prefer the neck shot if I can

I prefer the heart shot. But whenever I see one of these diagrams, it serves to remind me that every time I have pulled the trigger on an elk, I was actually aiming at the aortic arch.

I have a hard time pulling the cross hair on down into that bottom quarter of the chest.

I've not seen any animal (I've taken deer and hogs) that can take a heart-lung shot and run more than 40 or 50 yards before expiring. Take a part of the shoulder with the shot and usually animals run shorter distances or expire on the spot. I've not taken an elk yet but, I would hope the same holds true. Hopefully, I will get to test this later this year.

Good luck with that. A "short distance" can be a long way when you are killing elk - usually down. They are big, strong animals. You hit the heart, they might drop where they stand, but even with a heart shot they will travel a ways.

The last bull I took down I hit with a solid broadside lung shot. He ran downhill 1,100 vertical feet into a canyon and then I watched him very slowly walk another 150 vertical feet up the other side before he laid down. It was a 180 grain 30-06 at 250 yards and the bullet went through the back of both lungs and buried itself into the shoulder on the far side.

That was a brutal pack out.

Oh man! Your bull ran 1,100 vertical feet down in a canyon and died on the other side. Sounds normal for a bull elk! Likely deadfalls crisscrossed in the bottom!

I recall a thread about bad places critters have run to and died. Lot of elk tales. I shot a 6x6 in the point of front shoulder corner to corner as he quartered toward me in dawn fog high on a HUGE canyon. The way out was uphill. He did not twitch other than to carefully look around for the source of the sound. I trusted my rifle and sight picture at the shot and knew he was dead on his feet, but did not want him to run a half mile to the bottom of the canyon. So when he turned his head I broke his neck behind his ear-- and he rolled and slid 150 yards down into a steep rock chute where he would roll and slide further with every touch. Not as bad as yours but very difficult!

Biggs300, after these tales you will probably drop a bull in his tracks this Fall on a clean level spot on the edge of a road cutbank level with the tailgate of your pick-up! ...And consider us all liars! Good luck in your hunt!

If ones lungs are not filled, they are collapsed and one is in serious trouble. Breathing is extremely difficult if there is any void between ones lungs and the chest cavity. Above the lungs one finds the aorta, above that the spine. Never had a failure with anything between the brisket and the spine.

I've never had a failure with anything shot with a 30-30.

Double yep. Happened to me. Hit a young bull high that went down like lightning struck him. Watched and waited ~ 15 min. and as I was getting up, so was he. As he turned to run away, he jumped over some deadfall and I was lucky enough to unzip his guts. Upon skinning, found the bullet had passed through under the spine and above any criticals.

There is definately something strange that can happen when hitting a little high behind the shoulder with an arrow which I just yesterday saw happen on TV.

First, many years ago my brother was adamant he saw the arrow hit good but a little high several inches behind the shoulder on a big Muley. We only found a few drops of blood and no deer after two days looking. I brushed it off.

A bow shop owner and international bow hunter friend years ago got a good hit, they thought, on a nice Co bull with outfitter Hank Chaffin. Hips target owner hunted with this guy, too. The arrow hit you know where. They never found the bull.

Last fall my bro called in a bull for a general surgeon pal who put one through the proverbial bad spot. At the time they were happy with an apparent good shot. A mile of trailing with a rare bit of blood passed before it petered out.

Yesterday on Savage outdoors Mike Stroff got what all thought was a great shot on a big white tail buck. You know the spot. Lots of trailing and little blood ended his hunt empty handed, but it was far from the end of the show.

He was hunting with an outfitter that Double Lung Outdoors had a hunt booked with 2 weeks later. They filmed the same buck come in to them while rutting a full two weeks later. There was an obvious wound in the ribs well behind the shoulder on the entrance side that was about 8 or 9 inches below the top of the bucks back. There appeared to me to be no opposite side injury as the buck came in on camera. The Double Lung show hunter got that very same buck. Unfortunately they did not go into a postmortem evaluation on the show which would have been very interesting with regard to penetration, etc.

As a consequence I will now concentrate on holding more on the shoulder and lower with my pin.

The high shoulder shot has always been a favourite of mine for immediate results, however, I have shot red stags that have fallen down and struggled as I walked up to them and then got up to run or were trying to get up and looking successful.

I have had to put a second shot into them, usually neck at that range.
I have found that a bullet going just underneath the spine can do surprisingly little damage. IT can go through a shoulder blade and then cut across the top of the thoaratic cavity and ribs without doing much damage to the lungs at all.
Whether these deer may have survived for long I cannot say, but its possible because they didn't seem to have any real damage to anything vital.
In fact I did exactly this to a whitetail buck last Novemeber in Arkansas, it dropped and lay down for ten minutes after the shot and then got up and left the scene of the crime. I got him a full hour later about a kilometre away.
(On another red stag I had one mild loaded .308 go through one shoulder blade through just top of chest cavity under spine, then flatten itself again the leg bone on the other side without breaking it and without doing any damage to any vital organs. This deer was ambulatory and grimly determined also)
I don't know about a dead zone, but just underneath the spine (even if punching through a shoulder blade if it doesnt shatter)will not necessarily catch vital organs and is not immediately mortal. How big this area is when the animal is standing I don't know.
This is with heavier bullets in .30/06, .303, .308. I have never had this with faster lighter bullets that are more violently expanding, such as the .243 and the .25/06. SO I think a hit in the same spot with these is doing more damage; with these the bullet is going in and blowing up and bone splinters, you are going to collect more of the top of the lungs also shock or damage the spine more, ie, pour everything out on the ground afterwards.
I think if you decide to specialise in high shoulder/spine shots, you are going to come across the phenomenon sooner or later.

Good post.

I was asked to add an opinion to this topic, as I have not been on the site much and I have been quite busy fishing and in Africa.

I do not think I have ever seen any big game animal in all those we have taken that has survived a shot in the area folks seem to believe exists between the top of the lungs and the bottom of the spine.

The lungs and spine overlap and there is no gap. There is however a large area above the spinal column which only has the vertebra "fins" which can be broken and allow an animal to run free and live a long life.

With a properly placed modern bullet that is a good quality expanding projectile the trauma to the tissue involved with a "high lung" shot would be devastating to say the least. My opinion, too high above the lungs and the spine is impacted from actual bullet damage, or the shockwave of the bullet pushing the tissue and compressing it to failure. To low and you're in the lungs.

Too high above the spine and then you have a chance to see the animal fall, and get back up, or just bolt to parts unknown with little to no blood trail and no vital organs hit.

I have in my career seen several animals with the "fins" on top of the vertebra broken and floating in the meat, and several that have had holes, or damage which allowed them to fuse back over time.

Low is better in my opinion, better lung size to provide a better margin of error, lower in the body to get far better blood flow and tracking evidence.

Here is a sectioned deer, typical of most hoofed game see the lungs are equal to the height of the spine, but there are several inches above the spine that have nothing but vertebra and meat. On Elk this is a quite sizable area, and on game like Gemsbok, Kudu, and wildebeest, this is more then a foot of "dead space".

I'm not in the camp of believing that there is an area between the top of the lungs and the bottom of the spine that can be hit and allow the animal to live. Escape and evade tracking maybe without good blood flow to the earth. But not continue to live any length of time.

A centerfire rifle with a good bullet will provide a tidal wave of tissue that will disrupt the lungs and the spinal column in a big way. If folks are seeing this type of shot with an animal that runs, then I would have to think it's with small or slow cartridges or with bullets not designed for the impact velocity that occurred.

I guess that's my opinion. So now some of you guys can rip on this and enjoy the site!

Those 'fins' are called 'processes', or 'process' for singular.

In 2011 I put a 225g .338" AccuBond through a spinal process bone on a cow elk and can assure you it wasn't immediately fatal. Had I not quickly put another in a more appropriate location (two actually, making one elongated hole in the rib cage) that cow could have gone quite a ways and may well have survived provided infection didn't get her.

The black circle in the photo below shows where the first shot went. If you look closely you can see grass through the hole. The photo also shows just how high the spinal processes are.

JJ, good and thoughtful post, well reasoned, well said and the sectioned deer shows the "upper bulge" of lungs extending up past the bottom of the spinal bone on both sides of it. Was it frozen to keep parts in place so well?

You know how much I respect your experience, yet I also know what I've seen and experienced. I suspect that minimal bullet opening is a factor, which happens once in awhile, and these below the spine hits are not common (if they occur ). I also suspect that soft tissue organs like lungs move around a bit with animal movement and position, which could also be a factor in nicking a lung rather than blowing a significant hole through the top of it/them.

Two views:

1. It is possible to pass an expanding bullet close under the spine of an elk without doing enough damage to kill it. More likely would be without damage enough to leave sufficient sign to follow and find it if and when it dies.

2. Number one is impossible primarily due to physiology but also to bullet expansion.

If there's an air gap in there, the elk's going to have a heck of a hard time breathing.

There is NO Empty space in the chest cavity except for that part of the lungs that is filled with air.

As shown above, the cross section of the chest cavity is sort of heart shaped and the top lobes of the lungs are actually above the bottom of the spine.

The will to live can be extraordinary and animals can survive with some horrendous wounds. I read an article in a hunting mag several years ago that had many pictures of things (bullets, broadheads, etc.) that were found when deer were butchered.

One picture showed a doe that had speared herself with a stick about 1 1/2 FEET long that penetrated the brisket between the shoulder and neck and broken off inside. When the doe was butchered the stick was found and was completely grown over and encapsulated with scar tissue.

A good friend of mine shot a buck years ago that had a wad of birdshot about 2-2 1/2" in diameter at the back of the skull/top of the neck. The wound was grown over and wasn't found 'til the taxidmist caped the buck.

So maybe six posts seem to support the possibility to some extent.
The rest not.
Maybe I can help muddy the water.

We experienced a most bizarre bullet deflections off bone.
Bullet hit the scapula, followed the foreleg down, and exited the hoof.
I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't help take it apart.

Could deflections somehow play a part?

I'll take the word of piles of medical research over the non-scientific theories any day.
An air gap defies the laws of physics. It messes up the necessary vacuum that allows the diaphragm to operate the lungs.

Rock Chuck, if the bullet hole(s) stay open the lungs won't work. No question on that. Bullet holes may be small however and have lots of flexible material around them. How do we treat a sucking chest wound? Seal the hole. That's not impossible to happen naturally. Several writers have noted that a bullet hole in the hide may not align with internals and so close off a blood trail.

I believe the science and the biology in general but also don't discount some astute field observations by pretty credible men. Carlsen Highway isn't always polite but he has shot a lot of game.

Here is a hole-into-the-lung-cavity-and-survived story. I killed a bull moose with an odd dent angled down the side of his ribs. A row of ribs on that side had been broken inward and healed over with a large lump along the inside of the ribs sealing off the break and covering the broken rib ends. That lump was full of moose hair-- his own hair! It had been pushed into his chest cavity by the antlers of another bull in a fight. The antler tips had broken his ribs, made several BIG punctures and cuts into his chest cavity and pushed several large handfuls of his hair inside his thoracic cavity. That hole was larger than any exit wound I've made in a moose with a bullet.

Assuming he was injured during the rut, that hole in his rib cage had been made at least one year prior and he was totally healed, thriving, pursuing a cow.

The OP is about the mythical 'dead zone' above the lungs on a healthy animal. That's exactly what it is - mythical. Once the animal is shot, some strange things can happen but the simple fact is that no bullet can go through a dead zone that doesn't exist. Somehow it's managed to go through tissue with apparent minimal damage that likely proved to be fatal later.