Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting What did this guy do wrong?

Second day of our WI. deer season and an acquaintance of mine had a 70 yard shot at a mature 10 point buck. Trouble was the deer was heading directly away from him so he aimed for the butt hole and shot. .308 bolt action shooting a 150 grain Hornady SST. Lots of blood in 3" of snow. He has 40 acres to hunt on before it goes into another property. He and his brother try to track the deer, but the deer stops bleeding and after two hours they have given up finding it. What should he have done differently?

First mistake was shooting it in the butt! Wait for a good shot angle and pass until you get it. If the buck wasn't spooked it probably would have moved around some and given a shot at the chest. The intention of the shot should be a quick kill and shooting it in the butt is not a quick kill shot. Either the hunter is inexperienced or he is an idiot.

Uh, not try to run an SST up the mud pipe?

They usually can't go far with a legit texas heart shot.

Yeah, we don't really know it was hit.

I'm not second guessing the guy but this is for me.

1. No way I'd do the THS. Not my thing
2. I would have waited for a better shot, something into the chest.
3. Absent that and if, for whatever reason, I believed I MUST shoot this deer and I must shoot it RIGHT NOW - if I think I can poke the cheerio, I'd think I could poke the spine in the neck. Drop right there.
4. 2 hours looking is hardly anything. Snow on the ground? Track without blood.

Yeah, I've told him that an SST is a fast expanding bullet. Would a shot at the root of the tail drop a deer from spinal damage? Not a good shot we know, but it is WI. in brush country where we don't get many shot opportunities, especially at big bucks and I'm sure that he got excited seeing that one leaving.

I agree Teal, two hours is nothing! The only one that I've ever lost I looked for for two days and didn't have snow.

Probably skinned along the top of the back but missed the neck.

Or went wide-ish and clipped the hams/gams/rear quarter area. Chunk gave blood but obviously nothing arterial.

pretty much sums it up right here.

Have I done it? Yep. Will I do it again? Nope.

From the picture he sent, it looks like it bedded and bled enough to have melted out lots of the snow. Then there is maybe a couple of feet without much blood then more higher up. That says to me that there might have been an exit higher up on the deer. There are lots of big blood vessels in those hams and I remember reading once where Chuck Adams, a noted archery guy, said that he will get a deer hit in the ham with an arrow. When I've tracked a wounded deer, if they quit bleeding after they had been, that deer is running on borrowed time and is near out of blood and likely down pretty close by.

I don't know when/where and how it looks now - but I'd be in the snow looking some more.

I used the sst in a 3006 180 grain. Very frangeble bullet.

A 150 grain 308 caliber bullet in cup and core ain’t renound 4 it’s penetrating abilities.

My guess is the bullet never got through the abdomen and you were dealing with a gut shot deer.

They need time to expire from peritonitis.if you bump em before death the adrenaline rush they expierience can get them a long way from where they jumped.

Why the butt? It's dead but maybe a long way off. If he'd hit the base of the tail, he'd have broken the pelvis and dropped it like a rock.

If an SST went up the poop chute it seems to me blood loss would bring on death long before an abdominal infection would amount to much.

I took a butthole shot on a running blacktail and caught him on the up bounce. Shot his nuts off and opened his belly up. LOL Everything spilled out.

Not the best but it worked. Good blacktails come hard I wasn't letting him run w/o a shot fired.

You are assuming the sst bullet hit vascular tissue.

They can at best run 60 mph IMO. So in 10 seconds they can go about 300 yards

Better recalibrate your speedo...no whitetail is hitting 60mph, anywhere. Ever.

There are lots of deer where this guy hunts and he did get an 8 point the second weekend, so I don't think that he was as motivated as lots of us would have been. I do think that he probably hit it where he thought, but the bullet went through the pelvic arch and didn't break the pelvis. He went after it too soon and jumped it up I suspect. By having both he and his brother looking for it, they mucked up the track, made more noise and couldn't sort it out from the other deer tracks in the area.

I would have used a stronger bullet, probably a 165 grain or at least a Ballistic Tip, Interlock or Core-Lokt.
Shot it higher up on the back to break it down, if I couldn't get the neck.
Gone after it alone slowly after at least an hour or two and marked every blood with toilet paper hanging in a branch to get the direction.
Tracked it to the property line, then did what I could to snow track it further.
Watched for crows or jays, looked for coyote tracks if I hadn't found it that day.

20/20 hindsight, I know, but someone (me) should learn this guy better. I've recovered deer that lots of guys didn't or wouldn't have.

I've seen the up-the-ass shot work, and I've seen it fail. The fails are 3:1 v successes. I've tried it before, but won't do it again, and I openly ridicule guys who try it. Too much can go wrong. Not a high percentage shot. The one success I have seen was with a Nosler Partition. Two of the failures I've seen were with Nosler Partitions.

And guys want to bitch about 223 for deer being unethical...