Was talking with an aquantance last night who constantly gives me a hard time for shooting such large, high intensity rifles as he says his 270 Win will do anything the bigger guns will do and last longer as well. I told him to come to LRH and read this post. He is not a member here but comes and visits now and then.
Anyway, had an e-mail from him this morning where he simply attacked long range hunting and all of us being ego bound for the reason that this elk was lost.
And that his 270 would have done as well or better then how this story turned out......
I looked at the time of his e-mail and noticed he had JUST sent it and that he was marked as on-line with G-mail so I sent him a chat message to see if he was around. He replied and the debate started......
Asked him if he remembered loosing that big 6x6 bull elk two seasons ago during the Montana archery season? He replied that he remembered but asked what that had to do with anything. Well, when I heard about his situation, he was down at a local archery shop owned by a friend of mine. I had stopped in to talk with my friend and there was a group of guys talking about archery hunting stories. I was just hanging around listening to the conversation as my friend was working with a customer. I was amazed to hear story after story from these, "self proclaimed archery elk hunting experts", about elk being lost. Of the 6-7 guys in the group, I heard 5 different stories of hitting and loosing elk during archery season.
When they talked about each story, each and every one of them had an excuse as to why the elk had gotten away, bad broadhead performance, elk took a step (no fault of their own for the bad hit!!!), bull jumped the string. After hearing just about enough of the crap I walked over and asked if what I was hearing was true, that 75% of the hunters flapping their jaws had lost a bull elk in the past 3-4 years and not one instance was because of a bad shot from them?????
They just stood there stupified that someone called them out on it as it seemed this was not unusual in the bow hunting crowds. Just something that happens and is part of bow hunting, thats why its "SO DIFFICULT".
One guy spoke up and replied, well, we do not feel that we need to shoot cannons to harvest our big game animals. My only reply before I left the crowd was "ya, your archery gear is doing very well for you, isn't it!!"
My point for this post is simply this. IN my 15 years of long range shooting and 10 years of long range hunting, I have never lost a big game animal that I hit at ranges past 500 yards. Now, I did not say I have not missed animals, there have been a couple of misses for sure but I have NEVER lost a big game animal that I hit at long range.
More to that point, I have spoken with and had reports from HUNDREDS of customers of their big game hunting results at long range and over the past 10 years I can count on one hand the number of big game animals lost from long range hunting.
My point is this, lost wounded game happens but it is actually a very rare thing in the long range hunting community. Even more then that, when it does happen, most long range hunters, just like Elkaholic, are humble enough that they blame themselves before thinking up a list of excuses as to why they lost the game animal when in most situtations, the reason the animal was lost was about 95% on the shoulders of the hunter.
I have heard reports of dramatically more big game lost from conventional rifle and archery hunters then anything coming from the long range community. Yes there are alot more conventional hunters which could mess with the numbers but in my way of thinking, its more likely that we as long range hunters GENERALLY are much more perfectionists when it comes to our equipment and what shots we are willing to take.
At times we make poor judgement calls. In the case of Elkaholics situation, as he mentioned, had he approached the elk with a rifle ASSUMING it was still alive it likely would have been shot in its bed, who of us have not made the same mistake approaching game. How many of us have stormed up to a dead animal that would have jumped up and ran like hell because of our approach to the animal but we were just lucky that the animal was dead or we would have had the same result.
Hell, a couple years ago I punched a decent mule deer buck through both shoulders at a bit over 700 yards with my 7mm AM. Fell on his nose. It took me around an hour to get to the buck. Knowing the buck was dead I decided to go light for the hike to the buck and just took my 1911 handgun and left my rifle at the truck.
Got to the buck, reached down and grabbed the antlers to pull the buck down to a flat spot so I could dress the buck out. Grabbed the rack, started pulling the buck down the hill and felt something odd, the buck was pulling back on me, HARD!!! He then stumbled to his feet, kind of, and flopped and stumbled down the hill about 100 yards away from me..... Obviously I had a fully alive 300 lb buck that was wounded and it was getting very dark and I only had my **** handgun. Well, things worked out, got a bit western to finish him off but my point is I did the same thing Elkaholic did, assumed the animal was long dead.......
Generally long range hunters blame themselves for these situations, most conventional hunters and bow hunters I have talked to generally blame their equipment or something other then themselves for this type of thing but most hardcore conventional hunters will call us the ego bound ones.......
There are several good points made by elkaholic to help all of us remember how to do things correctly. 1. Use enough gun with the right bullets for the job. 2. approach big game as if you expect it to jump up and run away.
Very good points for ALL OF US to remember and I commend him for having the humility to tell us this story more for a reminder for all of us.
