Herewith, one of those rare real life cases where maybe a bigger caliber and stouter bullet made up for less than ideal placement. No ethics problem for me but to each his own...
A young acquaintance of mine last week put a 180 grain .30 Swift A-Frame into the ham of a big subalpine buck as it hustled into brush steep uphill between rock ribs and strips of scrub timber. 75 yards or less and take that shot or leave it and likely not see that buck again. Not many deer in that country and this one had the largest antler frame of any we�ve seen in ten seasons in that area. I�d not disadmire anyone for not shooting if that were his scruples.
The bullet shattered about 8 inches of leg bone up to the ball joint, missed damaging the paunch somehow, went through liver, lung and heart and stopped against the front wall of the chest. Stern to stem. The buck whirled downhill in a fold of ground that prevented a follow-up shot. He was dead about 160 yards downhill from the hit, in a thicket so steep he�d slide if you breathed on him. He was an unusually tough deer I�d say, because he ran all or nearly all of the way down there rather than rolled, and from his tracks he bedded, then got up and moved deeper into the thicket when his tracker got close.
I think a hit in the same place with a stout .22 bullet would have collected him albeit maybe a good bit farther down in the canyon to pack back up to the trail, and he might have been harder to find, maybe a lot harder. It would almost certainly have required a follow-up shot since I wouldn�t expect the .22 to penetrate from ham into chest vitals, though he might have bled out from damage in the ham. That day, on that shot, it was good to have a stout bullet in the big .30. That�s not great shot placement but there�s no deer going to absorb that one.
Size of the buck: 102 lbs of boneless meat packed out, plus nearly 6 lbs of antler and cleaned skull plate. We left a good 15 lbs or more of bloodshot ham splintered through with bone fragments. That�s a lot bigger than most blacktails. This one was a Cascade or �bench-leg� mule deer/blacktail cross, west side of the Cascades.
