What nobody talks about is a less than perfect shot placement and using too hard a bullet for the animal. We can only shoot one buck a year here, so my bullet testing pool is single numbers, not dozens. Anyway, a couple years back I'd shot some deer with a 7mm-08 140 grain Barnes TSX. A neck shot and lung shot did the job with what I thought were rather narrow wound channels. Then I shot a broadside buck higher in the back because he was in tall grass and that is what I had to shoot at. That deer ran away and hid leaving only 5 drops of blood that I could find. Contrast that to last year's buck also in tall grass and shot high in the back with a 140 grain Ballistic Tip. Down right there. Losing 5 pounds of shoulder meat sure beats wasting an entire deer. Lesson learned.
