Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Long Range Hunting Realistic Distance For Ethical Kills

Best advice I can give you is to take whatever rcmagulia and John Burns have to say, flush it right down the toilet, and go hunting.

Just Rick being Rick winning friends and influencing people. If you think he is bad now you should have seen him before.

I hear what rcmagulia is saying and although it could have been said in a much nicer more constructive way, well its true.

With a good dope the setup for that shot would have been fairly quick
range it, range it, range it and range it again. Range in front of it behind it and on it be sure of the distance of the animal.
Check the angle dial in the corrected dope.
Check the wind chances are where that elk was standing next to that cliff if there was any wind it would most likely be an up or down draft. Spotter on and send it.
Dialing in a correction after a miss is often a second miss. In this case it was ok because it was only an elevation correction due to bad input and the animal was not spooked.
Just a thought but hold off the splash and get another round in the air under the same conditions as quickly as possible.

Where was the POA for the shot? high shoulder? center? What was the true angle? it had to be at least 30* even on a high shoulder to miss.

Live and learn I bet the next time angle will be in your mind as much as anything else

I bet the miss had more to do with the tough position than any thing els. Look at the picture of where he shot from. No one is in disagreement about proper equipment and practice as well as proper dope and a consign indicator. No one is saying different from what I have read here.

I agree, BUT the OP stated himself that his dope was off due to angle so I have to take him for his word.

I was talking about this one

Yup, that's the same one.

1226 yards right in the boiler 3 degrees of angle 3.5 mph wind 7mm LRM the shot was about 2" back from perfect but hey I hope thats acceptable to you and your standards

Good grief. It's called hunting. People miss.

I work with, shoot with, and compete with the best shooters alive. Guess what? They all miss at times. They all miss really easy shots as well. It's the frequency of misses (and wounding in hunting) that tells something. It's a percentage game. If someone is consistently missing or is wounding animals frequently then we have a problem. If someone buys their gun halfway sights it in, and then starts slinging lead (they would be called average hunters) we have a problem. If some practices hard, shoots from odd positions, takes shots they are confident that they have a high probability to make, and misses an animal with the first and kills with the second, then we have high fives and hand grenades.


When someone makes such a big deal about one missed shot on an animal, that tells me that they haven't killed all that much. It's kind of like the average decent hunter that kills one or two big game animals a year for twenty years, only wounding and losing one or two in that time, getting on a soapbox because someone makes two bad shots a year..... Ignoring that the other guy kills more in a year than the first has in his entire lifetime.

Don't worry about it wildwyo. Practice hard and go hunt.

Rick has never missed. Ever.

Tanner

Amen. Like basketball- even NBA players miss. All of 'em do it. They don't make 100% of their shots just because they take high-probability shots, have the skills, and practice hard.

Shooting a bullet at something is always an unknown to some degree. That's the risk we take when we decide to go hunting. The important thing is that we do our homework, and then take our misses to heart, learn from them, and try not to repeat the same errors in the future.

Thanks for the support fella's.Don't worry I won't lose any sleep over this thread.
Rc obviously has a ton of experience shooting varmints at long distance, but obviously suffers from a bit of penis envy when it comes to hunting critters with antlers. A lot of great information has been shared on this thread and I have learned a quite a few things. Backcountry, that is one hell of a bull and an incredible shot!

Hell of a bull..Congrats.

I have some self imposed rules I try to stick to and I broke them last night; I try not to post when I'm pissed or frustrated. I can't seem to get my point across about this deal.

The thread is about each person's limit of distance that they are able to make one shot kills. Yeah, sometimes there are misses and that's not the issue here. The issue is why the miss happened.

If the miss is directly due to the shooter's lack of preparation for the shot that he has total control over and simply not because "stuff happens", then the question of honor or ethics comes in.

What frustrates me is that aren't any here in this discussion, save 338Norma, that understand the point. I thought more here who post, would.

First, like I've said before, I can't imagine in any situation, hunting or Match shooting, being so negligent in making sure my load data is dead nuts accurate at the location that I will be shooting. For hunting, not to do so is a huge ethics problem as I see it.

To me it's THE most important thing in this game. I'm blown away that so many think its trivial.

What we have all been talking about here is making your best effort to make clean, one-shot kills at your personal limit of range. If you don't account for data differences, a certainly controllable factor with I think is a basic, fundamental prerequisite for anyone wanting to hit a target at long range, I have to call it as I see it. Amazing to me that not many here think that it is important.

The entire reason I hung photos was to illustrate that very fact. The pics were of very small targets that were taken with first round hits at some fairly long ranges for some. If i had not made exactly, positively sure that my drop data was correct for each of the locations, do you think there would be any possibility of accomplishing this? Do you think that not taking an elevation change of 3000' would yield the results? They're certainly not 24" targets.

Secondly was the position. I think his rest would easily be good enough to hit a 2 foot target at 565 yards if any type of practice positionally was had. This is in the shooter's control as well. If you haven't had the practice time in positions like this, you have to pass on the shot to be ethical. Like was posted earlier, it increases the probability of wounding by a ton, EVEN if your dope is perfect.


Now, go back to wildwyo's initial question to the board which showed a picture of an elk at a known range of 565 yards and if I thought it was Ethical to set up for the shot.

If he would have provided the information that his data for his load he dialed was for 3000' lower and he would be shooting from an unsteady position on a rock for which he had little practice to further complicate the situation, my answer would have been different


...and yes Tanner, I've missed. Once.

Only one missed shot, ever?

It was actually a "9" hit.... close enough to a miss....

I will say this though.... LR shots on coyotes impress me more than LR shots on anything else. They're like hitting an index card.....

If he would have provided the information that his data for his load he dialed was for 3000' lower.... how many times are you going to refer back to this man? he never said that... You took words from my scenario and are using them against him..

All the same angry or not your responses reminded me of an argument with a pissed off 15 year old.. I certainly hope you have learned from this thread a thing or two about forum ethics and take the time to consider your obvious mood at the time of response; I am sure my respect for your opinion is not the only one you lost after last nights rampage..

All this talk about mega distance shooting at animals makes me ill in the stomach and gives me a case of the vapors. What ever became of woodsman skill and backcountry ability and huntsman capability? Why is it now so "spectacular" to kill animals at super supreme distance, rather than using your wits and your time-proven ability to get in, close?

Maybe you missed the name of this forum. It is called long range hunting. Just a heads up for a .com friend.

You're in the LR hunting forum...