Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters MID-APRIL column--Neck Shots

NECK SHOTS ON BIG GAME

Quite a few big game hunters are big fans of neck shots, some even claiming they're foolproof. I'm certainly not anti-neck-shot, having literally taken tons of big game with them over the decades, but hunters who claim they always work are either relatively inexperienced or willfully ignorant.

Let's start by pointing out how and why neck shots work. They're most effective when breaking the spine, which instantly drops and kills the animal, but also work well when passing close under the spine, through the jugular veins and carotid arteries. A high-velocity, expanding bullet that passes under the spine but through those blood vessels often stuns and drops the animal, which then bleeds out before it can recover.

However, hitting spine or blood vessels isn't necessarily a sure thing, partly because big game animals vary considerably in size, and necks are often very muscular, especially on males with heavy antlers or horns. Their necks also increases in size during the rut, due to jousting with brush or rubbing on trees, partly to spread scent but partly as a "workout" for fighting with each other males.

Plus, the location of the spine varies throughout the length of the neck, usually being closer to the center of the neck near the body, but toward the top of the neck just below the head. As a result, the necks of some bucks and bulls are so large that just hitting the neck doesn't necessarily mean the bullet will break the spine, or significantly damage blood vessels, especially when shooting a broadside animal.


There's a lot of tough muscle surrounded the relative thin spine in this mule deer's neck.

The neck muscles themselves are also pretty tough, as anybody who's butchered and cooked them soon discovers, due to far more connective tissue than most other meat in the body. When thickened and strengthened by the rut, neck muscle can even cause problems with bullet penetration. Three prime examples occurred on a Montana mule deer and bull elk, plus a Cape buffalo in Africa.

I encountered the deer decades ago in northwestern Montana, after climbing to the top of a timbered ridge in the steep, thick country near the Idaho Panhandle. The buck stood uphill about 75 yards away, on a trail between a couple of boulders, and at the time was the biggest mule deer I'd encountered with a tag in my pocket and rifle in my hand.

I shot offhand and missed completely, because for some reason the scope reticle wandered all over the place. The buck ran directly toward me, apparently confused about the direction of the shot, and my second shot centered his chest at around 20 yards, dropping him--but he started trying to get up on his front legs, so I shot him again in the neck, which dropped him permanently.

Or so I thought. While field-dressing him I found the first bullet had done considerable damage inside his chest, then broken the spine at the rear of the ribcage and exited. A companion and I managed to get the carcass on a horse and down the mountain, and after a week of hanging (and drying) in my garage the buck weighed 232 pounds. Using the standard formula for live weight, he'd have weighed about 300 on the hoof.

His neck was bigger around than my 24-year-old waist, and while butchering him I found the second bullet, expanded widely and resting against his unbroken neck vertebrae. He did not die from that "finishing" shot, but the first bullet tearing up his vitals. (Quite a few hunters brag about bullets that penetrate the length of an animal's body, but in reality that's not unusual, partly because the innards of a big game animal are it's softest parts. I've seen a wide variety of bullets end up in the rear of a facing or quartering-on big game animal, including a couple of Nosler Ballistic Tips, one on a 450-pound gemsbok.)

The bull elk was shot by my old friend and mentor Norm Strung, as it stood looking at him in a stand of lodgepole pine. The only vital area Norm could see was the upper third of the neck, so he put the bullet in the bull's throat. The elk turned and ran off, but it had snowed the night before so Norm could easily follow the tracks, occasionally finding a spot of blood. After half a mile he found the bull dead, but the bullet had only nicked an artery, and like the bullet from my mule deer was resting against the unbroken neck vertebrae. If there hadn't been new snow on the ground Norm might never have found the bull.

Now, both bullets were 150-grain cup-and-cores from .270 Winchesters, but pretty highly regarded cup-and-cores. The bullets that took the mule deer were Hornady Spire Points, and while the first obviously penetrated very well, the second didn't penetrate nearly as deeply through the tough neck meat. The elk bullet was one of the original heavy-jacket Remington Core-Lokt round-noses. If either had been a "premium" bullet, they probably would have broken the spine--but the bullet used on the Cape buffalo was a "monolithic" 300-grain solid from a .375 H&H, obviously a deep-penetrating premium bullet.

I was shown the solid by PH Keith Gradwell, who'd shot it into the bull's neck a couple days earlier. He had been guiding a client and, as often happens after the first shot on buffalo, there'd been more rounds expended, even though the client's initial bullet had been well-placed, because the buffalo did not immediately fall over. During the shooting, Keith got a broadside opportunity at the neck. The bull went down--but immediately got back up again, turning belligerently toward the hunters, and after some more shooting finally died.

The solid from the neck shot was found lodged between two vertebrae, bent considerably. Evidently when the bull turned toward the hunters, the strength of the neck muscles and the spinal column bent a 3/8-inch diameter brass rod.



Some neck-shot animals were never found. One was another mule deer buck in Wyoming, shot by a custom gunsmith I know well. He spotted the buck perhaps 150 yards above him on a sagebrush ridge, and all that was visible above sage was the head and upper half of the neck. My friend's an excellent shot and had a very steady rest. At the report of the rifle the buck collapsed straight down behind the sage. My friend got another round in the chamber, but the buck did not reappear, so he hiked up there--finding some blood but no deer. The blood trail disappeared quickly, and the desert ground was too dry and hard to show hoofprints.

Now, many people claim all the animals they shot in the neck went straight down and never moved--or ran off unharmed. However, another of my other friends once found a big mule deer buck that had been dead a day or so, with a neck wound that hadn't centered the vertebrae. Did the bullet nick one of the big blood vessels, so the buck bled slowly to death like Norm's elk? Nobody knows, but the bullet's entrance and exit wounds were below the spine.

Pigs, on the other hand, are pretty easy to kill with neck shots, because their necks are not only very short, but the spine runs just above center and the big blood vessels just below center. Put a bullet in the middle of that short neck and pigs normally drop right there, or within a few steps--as do African warthogs. There simply isn't the variation in interior neck anatomy found in longer-necked horned and antlered game, and the neck muscles also don't tend to be as tough.

However, I have used neck shots successfully on longer-neck game IF they're standing directly facing toward me or away, because at that angle the spine is obviously in the center of the neck. A good example here was a bull nilgai in the brushy sand dunes of the King Ranch in Texas.

My guide and I ended up about 50 yards from the bull, which stood facing us in the brush, trying to figure out what we were. I was using another .270, this time a WSM with 140-grain Fail Safes, a now-discontinued, deep-penetrating "petal" bullet that performed very much like Barnes TSX's, Hornady GMX's and Nosler E-Tips. I was standing with the rifle on shooting sticks, and the reticle rested very steadily a few inches below the bull's head, where the huge neck started to swell. At the shot he fell straight down and never moved, the tough bullet not only completely breaking the spine but exiting the thick skin on the back of the neck.

So yes, neck shots work very well under the right circumstances, but on animals with big, tough necks you have to use enough bullet, and make sure the bullet lands in the right place. This is also obviously true of chest shots on larger big game animals, but the "right place" for a chest shot is much bigger, whether from straight-on or broadside, ranging from the spine near the top of the chest through the lungs to the heart at the bottom of the chest. Which is why most hunters shoot for the center of the chest, rather than the much smaller vital area inside the neck.