I am not surprised the cow just stood there. Even if the shot had been a LOT closer, the sound is so far off that I do not think they know what is going on. I watched my bull this year eat 4 200ABs in the boilerroom from my 300WM at 683 yards without so much as a flinch. It really shakes your confidence when you can't definitively spot the impacts and they just stand there like you missed by a mile...but I trusted my calculations and just kept feeding the chamber until he went down.
This thread reminds me of one a couple years back. Unless I am mistaken it was a bedded cow that GG had someone shoot with his gun at a pretty long poke (was it 1200 or so? I can't remember). The first two impacts were in the guts before they walked them into the vitals. I was just getting set up for long range at that point, and given those results with GG's obvious talent, experience, and equipment, I questioned how far I should really be practicing to shoot big game. I came to the decision on 800 yards for my setup, and have felt comfortable with that decision. My reasoning is that I will never have the opportunity for enough long range practice nor the equipment of GG, therefore I will never have his skills. And if he was experiencing that degree of difficulty with first-round hits I was not going to approach the ranges he was trying.
Now we have a couple more reports over the past 2 years, GG you are still pushing the range out even though you're not putting the first round (or rounds) where you intend them. This year you'd already missed one animal multiple times at that range, then missed another before you finally connected. It's not that occasional mistakes are happening as can happen to everybody, but doing so either with yourself or someone else behind the trigger of your gun consistently.
This is not a long range issue, I'd be saying this to someone who shot with similar results at 100 yards. I like LRH as much as anyone and enjoy all the reports here where people do their homework and put the first round where it counts 90%+ of the time. Elk are not rock chucks, perhaps you should stick to rock chucks at those ranges until your first-round reliability increases out there. I'm not going to say you should follow my self-imposed limit as obviously you and your equipment should be able to get equivalent results further, but while I admire your skill and obvious preparation I'm not so impressed with the results. There should be a difference between punching steel or rock chucks and an elk.
Yeah I'm sure this will make me real popular...it's a legitimate observation however so before some of you leap in realize I'm quite comfortable with it and don't give a hoot about the "you'll never be GG" and whatever other crap you want to throw at me. I have communicated my appreciation for the help many of you have given me over the years ad nauseum (and I thank GG for helping me decide on a range limit before I had to learn the hard way) but that does not mean anything goes.
