Posted on 10/18/2017 7:43:56 AM PDT by w1n1
Put it down. No sense dealing with festering wounds and infections. The insects and critters would come calling and it’s a deer...ummm you’d have to trap it somehow, then drive it to the vet and it YOUR bill. Venison for din-din is much simpler
I go hunting. I no longer persue. I set myself behind the barn or by the pond as my grown kids scour the very steep hillsides. My friend and landowner goes up in his tree stand around 400 yards straight up the hill. He is a lousey shot and often misses or wounds. 2 years ago I heard a shot from his area. Around 10 minutes later I got up and slowly walked about. I came upon a trail and saw a doe sitting down there. It saw me and got up. I had no need to shoot a deer as my kids usually fill the freezer. But something was wrong. This doe had a big hole in its belly and was limping. I quickly put it out of its misery. Gutted it and hung it from a tree. About two hours later my friend and benefactor came off the mountain for lunch. I told him I got your deer. He didn’t understand. “You shot?” I asked. “Yeah”. “You miss?” “Not sure....it was only 30 feet away but I didn’t find blood ”. “Well it’s hanging from the tree “
This is a shame. I shoot to kill. But it’s his land. I gave him’his’ deer. Good way to keep being able to use his land.
“I mean, it IS rural Kentucky. :)”
You mean, “Guntucky”.
LOL
I'm going slightly off-topic, but one of my pet peeves in movies is how instantly everyone dies:
Touch by a sword? Death is instantaneous.
Pierced by an arrow? You're dead before you hit the ground.
Wearing armor? It won't help. At all. One touch and you're done for.
In real life, death usually takes longer. And battlefields (especially ancient battle fields) are filled with screaming as people slowly die.
Was the deer going to work?
As a former cop, I had a few calls for deer that had been hit by cars and survived. Difficult situation. A “mortal” wound can sometimes be a judgment call. A broken leg, a severe gash likely to get infected (after all, if the deer is immobile enough to be there when I rolled up in my squad car), the animal in obvious intense pain. I’d observe long enough to establish a comfort level and then make a decision. If I had to, I’d call dispatch and advise that I was about to put the animal down (in case they received calls from residents of gun-fire being heard).
Of course. If not, what is hunting about?
A couple of redneck hunters are out in the woods
when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn’t seem
to be breathing, his eyes are rolled back in his head.
His partner whips out his cell phone and calls 911.
He gasps to the operator, “I think my friend is dead!
What can I do?”
The operator, in a calm soothing voice says,
“Just take it easy. I can help. First, let’s make
sure he’s dead.”
....There is a silence, then a shot is heard. The
first guy’s voice comes back on the line. He says,
...OK, now what?”
Depends what the bag limit is and if I feel like spending the next three hours processing venison.
Its a moral question that every hunter should ask themselves before the hunt and right before you pull the trigger. Months of practice and honing your skill can result in a clean kill. Or buck fever can make you jerk a shot clean over into the next county.
I concur with that, though the deer isn’t always cooperative. The only deer I’ve ever had get away (That I shot at) was bowhunting. I had a gorgeous broadside shot, and I took it. About the instant after I released the arrow, she swung her head towards me, and took it full in the forehead. She got away.
That said, yes I would take wounded deer. If I’m not happy with the look of the meat after that, I might leave it for the coyotes
The show, “Connections” in 1979 touched on this. (James Burke)
Talking about ancient battles, He hung up a side of beef on a rope, took a nice sharp broadsword and started hacking away at it. He then said that that is what it does to a human being. It was gruesome.
He then, describing some famous battle a thousand or so years ago, said, each side, “Started doing this to one another as hard as they could”. He said, as you pointed out, most of those guys died a day or a week later.
And Louis l’amour discusses this regarding the old west and gun battles. He mentions that most of the time gunshot wounds were fatal only after serious infection set in. And he discussed on gunfight he “just missed” around the turn of the 20th century where a Texas Ranger and a drug dealer emptied each others guns into one another. Both died, but not right away.
This also gets into the concept of bullets as “man killer vs man stopper”.
But yeah, It cracks me up when they get shot and drop to a knee and say, “Ya GOT ME!” and die.
Phasers set to kill are way different, though.
I’ve mentioned that I’m surrounded by farm land and cattle. This summer, from multiple directions, I’ve heard my neighbors firing fully automatic weapons. I’m assuming they are bump stocks or something, for obvious reasons.
My wife and I would hear a burst and I’d say, “Welp. There goes another fifty bucks.”
HAHAHAHA!
That reminded me of when my wife and I were walking on our frontage road and a man and his son wore field dressing a deer in the weeds by flashlight. On OUR property, though technically it was “the ditch”. I shoulda asked for a percentage. :)
That’s why good hunters will quickly get to the place the deer was to check for blood - if they find it, or any other sign they scored a hit, they will start tracking it to see if they can “neaten things up”.
Since moving to rural Pennsylvania I have seen at least a dozen deer with broken legs and ankles (not from hunting, but probably traffic accidents or fences). I considered putting them out of their misery but let nature take it’s course. In many cases the deer get along just fine on 3 legs after a couple of weeks.
I have seen whitetails run for a quarter mile after being shot through the lungs.
Hardest animal to kill I have ever seen.
Oh, I know the deer don’t always cooperate, that’s why I noted, ‘not all’ in my post :)
Sometimes a bullet doesn’t perform like it’s supposed to, sometimes the critter is far more resilient than one would expect it to be etc. Still, when I hear people talking about taking an extreme shot at a deer, elk, etc. just to see if they could do it, I wince. The place to test your abilities is on the range, not in the field. Of course I’m talking about normal, managed hunting. In a survival scenario you have to take chances in order to eat and animal welfare takes a back seat to human survival.
A better question is would you shoot a deer that was horribly deformed, malformed, or obviously facing a horrible death by disease?
Deer are very prone to such things, and you do not want to do a Google image search for it, unless you want to get grossed out.
LOL! Doesn’t take long to go broke with full auto.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.