Valuable info and anecdotes for those with ears to hear.
A young man on his first local bear hunt saw a bear as he and three friends drove around the bend in a logging road. He jumped out and shot the bear tight behind the shoulder with his .300 short magnum as it angled away at 50 yards. (First mistake: shot placement on an angled animal.) The bear went down as nearly every bear I've seen hit does, no matter where hit. The young man turned to face his friends (second mistake) and did an end zone dance in the middle of the road. The bear got up behind him and left while he danced.
Ingrain the habit to cycle fast and stay on target.
Like rost495, I have refrained from shooting a few times when I knew that the animal was dead on its feet and not going to go anywhere. A moose that I had hit twice in the vitals was one. After the second shot he braced his legs out and used all of his will to stand, as dying moose often do. You can shoot a box of ammo into one at that point and unless you sever spine or brain, he will stay on his feet. His head and neck were behind a bush so I held the rifle rested crosshairs on his ribs till he fell over 15-30 seconds later, and did not shoot any more. If he had started to take one step I'd have shot him through the lungs again due to brush and the way he was standing.
Elk are a different story. I knocked a bull down 50 yards across a swamp from me, and held the crosshairs on him for I'd guess two minutes. He never moved. I hated it but I had to lose sight of him to get around the swamp to him. He was gone when I got there. In hindsight I should have watched him longer. Fortunately I heard him walking and chased and shot, chased and shot etc. Bullets tumbled sideways when they hit him through brush, till finally I knocked him down again and charged close enough to shoot him point blank when he got up. Ugly, and lucky to get him. I had another “stone dead” bull get up about the time it took me to cover 125 yards of tough ground to reach him. Both of these elk were mortally wounded but unlike moose that use their last strength to stand, elk will use that last vitality to run into a canyon in the next county.
