I started out deer hunting as a skinny azz 14 year old kid, shooting my daddy's Remington 760 pump in 30-06, using 180 grain bullets. No ear protection, and the rifle had no recoil pad. My ears would ring for a week, and my shoulder would feel like it had been hit with a concrete block. As a result, I became very sensitive to recoil. Over the years I've figured out that I don't need to use guns with a lot of recoil to hunt with here where I am.
For years I deer hunted with a 270, and though the recoil was certainly manageable, I'd begin to notice it after 10 rounds or so. But, I shot that rifle good enough to kill a truckload or two of whitetails, so in the field recoil was no factor. Same thing with shotguns, using the 3 and 3 1/2 inch turkey loads. Some guns were absolutely brutal to shoot while patterning a load, much more so than any rifle I've ever shot. However, when hunting with those shotguns, recoil was never felt.
Anyway, over the years I've learned that I do not need guns that kick the snot of me in order to kill a deer or a turkey. I deer hunt these days with a 6.5 Creedmoor and a 243. Either will kill a deer as far as I am comfortable shooting. I hunt turkeys using a 20 gauge, and have found that it's more about the pattern and the shells, than the gauge of the gun. Now, if I was hunting bigger game, or lived in a place where getting eaten by a large critter was a possibility, I would most certainly want to use a larger caliber rifle, and would consider the extra recoil as an insurance policy.
