Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting To shoot or not to shoot?

No shoot is the easy decision for me. I like to hunt and much as I hate to see wounded animals I'm not going to risk my ability to hunt by intentionally breaking the law.

Moreover, I talked to a then DOW (now CPW) officer who told me every year he would see quite a few three legged animals that survived to spring. The fact that an animal has been shot in the leg is not necessarily a death sentence.

I've been hunting several times in Alaska. One story really stuck in my mind about a hunt on Kodiak Island with my PH telling the story. He was on a hunt for Sitka and had a nice buck for his client to shoot. Unfortunately the shot went low and broke the buck's front leg - it ran off and, Kodiak being Kodiak, the rains came in and that was that. An unrecovered wounded buck.

This really haunted my PH. A couple years later he's guiding in the same place and he sees a buck walking along, hobbling just a little bit on one leg that wasn't quite right. They took the buck this time with a good clean shot and when my PH came up to it, he just kept thinking it somehow looked familiar. Skinning it out (they do have remarkable hides) he was shocked to see that the leg had been broken but a shot and had healed up over time.

So yes, the do survive sometimes. I don't think I would have taken the shot as the OP noted unless I had a proper cow tag in my pocket. If I did, I certainly would have finished the job.

We call the nice 5x6 bull on my wall "Old Stumpy" because I shot him bedded down and when I got to him found he was missing his right rear leg below the knee. The knee was double normal size and had grown hair completely over the lower portion of the leg. It looked like he had survived a couple of years after losing the leg. Hard to migrate or breed missing that leg but otherwise no problem.

In Colorado it is pretty risky not obeying the letter of the law without advance permission, finishing off wounded animals is something the game wardens would like you to do but only with the right tag in your pocket in most cases. In the instance where your group isn't involved and the other Yahoos might not have a tag for the cow I'd let her walk but feel badly for doing it.

That is a great story! I know a guy who was goat hunting here with his son and saw one with a gimpy leg. They thought about shooting it and then later talked to a game warden who told them they did the right thing by not shooting, lots of animals can get by with three legs.

Those Colorado wardens made a memory for us too. A buddy and I were camped at 8,500 feet and there was lots of of hunting pressure including those two wardens who busted my Wyoming buddy with the horses for not having certified hay. Who knew? Anyway, we wanted to get away from the other hunters so we hunted up Bald Mountain above the timber line around 11,000 feet. Who do we meet up there? Those same two wardens.

It would all depend on whether I judged the injuries to be lethal on their own. If they were obviously lethal, I'd put it down. I had to use a rock to crush the skull of a yearling buck my wife tagged with the car. She did everything right, watching for deer and slowing down when a group ran across the road in front of us. The little guy dashed out at the last second, and got his pelvis crushed. I did not like the intimacy of that death, and I think of it often.

If the elk in the situation was not obviously lethally injured, I'd watch it go, then go try to find who had shot it. They may or may not have intended to kill it. If they did, I'd direct them to its path. If they didn't, I'd lecture them on hunting ethics, attempt to get their names. Then I'd try to find a buddy with a tag to find it, finish it and tag it.

That's not a very well-kept secret, it's pretty much a standard requirement. I've never hunted with horses and I knew.

Granted Smokepole, but you live in horse country or at least where they have that requirement. Gary should have known because he had horses from Wyoming. Heck all that I knew about horses is what I learned from watching westerns on TV or the pony ring at at county fair. I got out there and they said here is your horse. Say what? I was the comic relief for the other guys because I was coming down in the saddle when the horse was coming up. The other guys were up on the ridge somewhere and the horse and I were feeding our way up the trail. He knew that I didn't know the first thing about how to ride him. Then I was walking him around like a dog on a leash. Do you know how hard it is to sneak up on an elk with a 1500 pound animal on a leash going "pbbbbbbb or weeeeee"? I didn't even start seeing elk until I left that hay burner back at the camp site and started still hunting them like deer back home. I will say that I never appreciated one horsepower more than when I had something just a little smaller than a Holstein laying up on the mountain in need of packing.

I probably would have shot it.

Last season I killed a nice mule deer, I didn't know it when I shot him that he had one hind leg shot off. It was.the first day of season, the meat was still ok, nice rack, and it made me feel good that he didn't have to die a long lingering death. I put my tag on him and took him home.

LOL, sounds just like my sum total experience with horses. Although some say you can sneak up on elk easier with a good horse. Glad you got one to pack out though.

I would not shoot it. Almost every wild animal dies what we would consider a horrible death. It is nature. Not many die of a heart attack from too much junk food. Most are either killed by predators, freeze, starve to death....or all the above. A few lucky ones end up on our table after a quick, humane death.

Based on my experiences with the DOW locally and around the state, that cow runs off to die on her own. Not getting involved in it at all. And one year I actually had a 3 legged cow go by and the 4th leg was gone right at the knee. She seemed to be enjoying life just fine as it was a previous years injury based on the healing of the wound. Plus bears had a hard fall this year so any protein they can get is good.