Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting Ballistics and meat damage

JB had a very good article about "eating right up to hole" and the meat damage or lack there-of based on cartridge, bullet speed, etc. I forget which issue of Rifle it was but it was the usual great common sense, real-life experience stuff from john.

I remember on my first deer- I clocked a buck right through the shoulders(high up) with a Partition.
The slug whizzed right on through, but the off shoulder was shredded.
Lesson learned!

ringworm, your rib shooting comment is spot on. This may be off-topic, but would you share/describe your "rockin' neck roast" I've got a young one that hasn't been butchered yet - is it bone-in or deboned? Bone in sounds tasty though. I'd sure appreciate it!

whole neck split verticle. sear meat in #8 cask iron skillit w/ high temp oil. place in crock pot with 1 pound of PURPLE (not red or new) potatoes. 3 whole carrots, 1 cup beef broth, 2 teaspoons of monteray seasoning, 2 teaspoons tabasco 1 half can flat beer.
cook on low 6 hours.

How do you split it? Right down the vertebrae or what? That sounds like all kinds of delicious...maybe an easy meal next week while finishing semester final projects! Thanks ringworm!

My wife seems to have solved this problem completely. Her two deer have had absolutely no meat damaged and her projectile is a 4,000 automobile. She seems to have a nack for popping them in the nose and breaking their necks. No muss, no fuss. Damage to car # 1 - nothing. Car # 2 was a dealer loaner, so the deductible of $100 covered it all.

This year I took a Buck that was shot earlier in the morning by someone else. Hit in the shoulder, broke the bone and fragmented. Don't know the caliber but guessing small high powered. I finished him off with my 9.3X62 at about 100 yards. Thru the lungs, heart and went through the same shot up shoulder. The 9.3X62 was a clean hole with no damage. This was the sixth deer taken with this rifle never have had any shot up meat. Can't say that for the wifes 243 with 100g, makes a mess unless good shot placement.

You need TSX's in that .243.

Bought her a 7mm08, TSX works well in this one. Still a larger caliber at medium velocity seems to damage meat less than small high velocity calibers from what I have seen in the field.

Thought I'd better put my boots on before I waded into this one...Lol.

The arm chair theorists really hit the key board quickly whe this topic comes up.

Any and all muscle tissue (Meat) is "damaged" when it is, well....Damaged by being displaced, streched, and torn by any object passing through it.
The "degree" of damage is subject to the amount of upset to that tissue.
But the degrees of damage caused by bullets is pretty much the same, when it comes to preservation for consumption, reguardless of velocity and diameter, and yes.., momentum.

I have read of such things as "eating right up to the hole..." Really... right up to the hole...? Sure, and if I was really hungry I might chew on the little bone chips too.

Those of us who shoot deer and other big game with such things as a 50 caliber round ball with an impact velocity of 1000 fps., to the 22-243 Middelstead 60 grain partition at close to 4000fps, to the meager 12 ga. Foster slug at 1400fps, to the 257 Wby 100 gr. at 3600fps. and on, and on, and on... We find that there is ALWAYS a pronounced amount of meat damage, and blood shot(bruised tissue), around the hole. But, no matter what the projectile, or the velocity, there is ALWAYS some meat/tissue damage.

I once thought that "Big, fat, and slow" bullets would "Greatly" reduce the carnage...Well, maybe slightly, but still nobody in my home is eating "right up to any holes..."

I have not found that the differance in bullet velocity, diameter, or momentum has been "much less" damaging, or "much more" damaging from one shot to another...A "little" differance, yes..., but with bullets made for hunting large game, the differanes have not been significant enough to say that this one , or that one "Saves more meat..." they all have proven similarily destructive.

Scott

358: Good post!As a general rule,if you wanna avoid meat damage,I suspect it's best to avoid high velocity and splashy bullets.Still all bullets destroy bone and tissue which is how they kill stuff...hard to avoid.

any your sitting on what, a milk crate?

phazers set on stun are the best way...

now that's funny!

Sitting..?
I'm not sitting, I am "Standing..," standing on experience.

Besides, too much sitting can make for a nasty case of Ringworm...so I've heard.

Don't really do much sitting.... unless it's on stand or at the reloading bench.


Scott

so your an expert in ballistics and trauma and everyone else is an arm chair ballistician at best?
try this on for size...
http://www.rathcoombe.net/sci-tech/ballistics/methods.html



"The killing power of a bullet in flight depends entirely upon the average size of the wound it makes in the animal, and upon nothing else. The size of the wound in turn depends upon the size, weight, construction, and shape of the bullet, and the velocity with which it strikes, and upon no other details. ... We frequently see it stated that the killing power of a cartridge depends upon its energy, and tables of the properties of cartridges often give the energy of each. Now energy depends upon the weight of the bullet times its velocity, and on nothing else, and thus can have only a very distant bearing on our subject." (Townsend Whelen, The Hunting Rifle, Stackpole Sons, 1940, pg. 236)

There is very little meat on the shoulder of an average white tail...don't sweat the small stuff.

I worry more about getting their carcus in the back of the truck with as little tracking as possible.

I always aim for the off side shoulder or through both shoulders on a broadside shot. Deer can and do run a long ways when lung shot. Perhaps 50% or more deer run when shot through the lungs, and deer running dead in thick cover makes for a lot of wasted time...often not recovering the deer if the buck is pumped up from chasing a doe in the rut.

It always has amazed me at how many people think that lung shots(staying away from shoulders) is the best shot to take.

I have lost two really good bucks that were lung shot at distances between 200-325 yards. My theory is to shoot the running gear out from underneath them so that you have something to eat...not how much you have to eat.

keith, I beg to differ, a good portion of my burger and stew meat comes from the shoulder. I'd MUCH rather dump it through the lungs, deer that are lung shot well are toast, through the ribs is my preferred shot. Don't take this the wrong way, it's an honest question, not trying to get the hackles up - How do you KNOW they were lung shot if you didn't recover them? Just curious. And apparently 358wsm is the authority on shooting deer and meat damage - most of the rest of us are making comments from our observations as well Scott. It's rather rude to imply that you're the only fellow killing deer and butchering his own.

Gee, unlike 358WSM, I have noticed a difference in how much meat various calibers, bullets and velocities will shoot up, at least in average. And I didn't do it from a chair. And I have seen close to 1000 animals shot with rifle cartridges from the .220 Swift to the .458 Lott, to maybe 100 more cartridges in between, including shotgun "slugs" from various sabot-launched expanders to Foster slugs.

I have eaten prett much right up to the hole on animals shot with moderate-velocity bullets from cartridges that get from 2100-2500 fps, especially if the bullet only lost 10% or less of its weight--and didn't hit bone. A few years ago I killed a big Canada moose with a 9.3x62 using a 286-grain Nosler Partition, range about 175 yards. I shot the moose at the rear edge of the shoulder, and lost a piece of meat about the size of my thumb. The bullet ended up under the hide on the far side, and the bull ended up stmblking about 15 yards abd going down. Have shot a number of other animals with the same combination (including deer) and never lost more than one handful of meat.

I also am not one who is convinced that shoulder meat is negligible, either in amount or type. On a typical 150-pound deer there are at least 3-4 shoulder steaks that can be cut from each shoulder, along with a good pot roast off the shoulder blade itself. This is before cutting off burger or stew meat. When anybody says they disregard the front end of a deer (or pronghorn) for eating then I know they are either lazy or ignorant.

As for eating up to the hole, I just finished butchering the right shoulder of the Iowa whitetail I killed last Saturday. I shot him with a .357 Maximum Encore pistol with a 215 gr. cast, gas-checked bullet, approx. Lyman #2 alloy I make myself. Velocity 15 ft. off the muzzle is 1850 fps with this load, I shot him quartering away at 166 lasered yards. In the third to the last rib, out the shoulder, he didn't take another step. The shoulder with the exit wound went entirely into the burger pile, bullet went through the shoulder blade. Zero blood shot meat, nice neat hole - I am "eating" right up to and including the hole. Entrance wound was a different story, I didn't want to take the time to clean the pile of hair from that piece of rib meat, but everything up to 1 inch away was just fine.