Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game Why isn't the meat blood shot when animals are shot with monolithic bullets?

Perhaps there is an impact velocity threshold that affects the resulting damage one sees. Or perhaps it's something else. If it is a speed deal, I suspect a mono can strike at a higher speed than a cored before creating as much mess on average. A couple of examples (among many I've seen) where the blood damage was almost nil...one was the very first animal I ever poked with a copper bullet, a 225 XFB from a 340 Weatherby into the shoulders of a large bull moose at around 200 yards. The bullet broke both shoulders, passing through the upper ends of each humerus. Short of a forward CNS shot, moose rarely tip right over, but that boy did and thrashed violently in an effort to regain his feet but those legs were obviously useless. Hardly a trace of blood in the surrounding wound channel. A second classic example was another moose, a young bull which I had hit low in the chest as he climbed up out of a willow pocket in the tundra. He was making tracks away from me nearly straight away, but I tried to run a second 225 from my 358 Winchester into his lungs. Not surprisingly the bullet landed a bit further back and drilled him neatly through 'the drumstick', busting the pelvis into chunks the size of marshmallows. It was one of those shots - not the first I had witnessed obviously- that make a meat hunter cringe. However, the only mess in that animal was in the lungs where the first bullet struck. Picking bone chunks and fragments out of the back end would probably have been a bit easier had there been some tell-tale blood clues to look for. There were none. It looked as if it were a section of meat taken from the cooler and fired into.

Obviously, not every shot works the same in terms of terminal damage, but that is true of any bullet. However, to my eye and experience, there seems to be a trend where monos frequently don't exhibit the blood-shot damage that lead-cored bullets tend to cause, again another trend. That doesn't answer the original question, but it does support the validity of the question (which is in question apparently ).

Now, I'm off to count my Partitions - if I can count that high. Lots of things to like, but overall consistency is very high on my list of trump factors.

Good post. Well said.

Coues deer, 257 100 ttsx shot at 400 yards.

It is not easy to kill with the rock just setting there,one must first throu it. Size of the rock and arm pends the size of the game. grin.

I either go big heavy high BC bullets for shooting longrangee or super fast lightweight bullets for smacking stuff up close. When I go lightweight I usually go monometal. I have not seen a reduction in bloodshot meat.

+1 except that I have seen less bloodshot meat with the light and fast monometals. Mind you, I'm talking 100gr .25, 130gr .308, 140gr 7mm, 85gr .243, etc, so not TRULY light and lightspeed fast...

IN general I have noticed less internal damage,less bloodshot meat, and longer to time die with monometals.
Which makes perfect sense.

I killed a whitetail buck at 20 yards last fall. 7mm rem mag 139gmx.


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The velocity at impact must play a big role. Here's a doe shot at 135 yds with .240 Wby., 85 TTSX, 3,600 fps from the muzzle. Probably not that much velocity loss at impact. This doe ran 100 yds. Several double hands full of blood clots between tip of shoulder and rib cage, filling the large cavity now visible. Lungs were messed up, but much more damage outside the chest than inside. Exit hole was around 1 1/2".

If this much destruction had occurred inside the chest cavity, I don't think she would have run 100 yds.

Going back next fall with 85 gr. NPT's. Now, those should make a real mess...

DF

That just looks like clotted up blood between the muscle groups, not blood-shot meat.

Based on the pictures I've seen, I'm starting to think that the GMX does do more meat damage than the TSX/TTSX. I'm wondering if this is due to the frontal shape of the expanded bullet- the TSX is an "X" with space between the petals for the tissue to squeeze through, while the GMX is more of a classical mushroom shape.

I had a pretty significant amount of experience using the 140gr Hornady in a .270 for a lot of years and have switched over to the 110TTSX at 3400fps to comply with a lead free zone. Only one deer with it so far and on a broadside rib shot it was pretty ugly. I was kind of glad I did not center punch the shoulder.

In conventional weights, ie 150gr or 165gr in a .308, with a TSX/TTSX the bloodshot meat is significantly less than a conventional cup and core but in my limited experience as soon as you cut the weight and up the velocity the issue of blood shot meat returns.