The mythos behind the Whitetail

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daniel craig

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Ask any person who has spent some time hunting, to tell you a story or two of their hunting experiences. Some will be true and honest but most seem to play into some sort of mythology that the Whitetail deer is a special mythological animal with an armored hide, redundant organs and blood that clots faster than anything. They’re so magic they can avoid a “well aimed” shot and completely disappear into the ether. If you don’t get them with “the right” kind of bullet they’ll just shrug it off and run away. They have totally random patterns of behavior and active camo that make a deer as likely as finding a good brick in your basement.

Now body will SAY this outright but their stories and implement choices say more than you can imagine. It’s especially true when people buy guns that could easily be decent anti-materiel weapons and bullets that perform 1% better then the standard bullet but cost 50% more.

Let’s face it. The whitetail deer isn’t some magic animal. What it comes down to is people not knowing their abilities and hoping that they can make up for lack of skill and good decision making by buying things.

(y’all, I’m pretty obviously exaggerating here so please try not to focus on that but on the underlying idea mmmmk)
 
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Now that's creative and funny! :D
daniel craig said:
Whitetail deer is a special mythological animal with an armored hide, redundant organs and blood that clots faster than anything. They’re so magic they can avoid a “well aimed” shot and completely disappear into the ether. If you don’t get them with “the right” kind of bullet they’ll just shrug it off and run away. They have totally random patterns of behavior and active camo that make a deer as likely as finding a good brick in your basement.
Click to expand...
 
Never felt or heard any of those myths among my family and hunting friends. Though see them a lot on-line since the dawn of social media.

While a whitetail's ability to sometimes just materialize silently though the woods in front of me has always amazed me, it's nothing supernatural lol.

As far as gun choices go, I come from a time when carry "enough" gun was the mantra, so 30-06, 303 Brit, 30-30, 35 & 30 Remingtons were/are the norm.
 
I think I see that more with pigs than deer, especially male pigs with the “shield”.

That said, I like using more than enough to dispatch them when hunting them, even though I have killed more with .22 LR or 9mm rounds than anything else. Either will pop right in the skull and empty the life out of them.
 
I have seen a deer disappear into nothing with just a step or two, and appear just as fast. I have a friend who has shot a few that took off and ran further than one would think with a "perfect lung shot" that turned out to be a little high/low or back. He would wait a bit and trail them right to the thickest nastiest briar patch in the woods. He never said it was "mythical" or "magic", rather he said they are unpredictable and make a worthy opponent.

Pigs on the other hand he said are a pain in the rear to deal with. They can be stubborn and mean if you don't get a good clean shot on them. He also said you can kill one with a sharp stick if you know what to do.
 
Today if one blanks a deer season its just pork, beef, or chicken in the freezer.

Got a store right down the way selling it.

We can play around w lighter bullets and wait for perfect shot opps.

Can sit in box blinds over food plots and wait for the deer we have inventoried off of game cam pics.

Will admit that I am not of the new fad psuedo super ethical hunter type.

I shoot moving deer, take thread the needle shots. And its all fair chase.

As long as its legal people can play this game however they want.

In big timber deer do appear/ disappear like smoke. Their fur color blend so well. But sometimes it doesnt and gives em away

Saw a decent deer due to that. Sun on back, gold horizontal dash amongst vertical greys

When i moved in for a shot he was gone, but looking over there he was, barely visible standing in front of a big tree. Almost perfectly blended in.

Those w lesser exp might have never seen him, at first or later.

Deer are amazing creatures and dare I say noble. Even if I dont kill em, I have to be out there with them, trying.

Its in my blood.

It does get harder each yr, to pull the trigger though.
 
No mythical deer have I ever killed. Once I had to shoot a deer twice. The first shot was in the kill zone, but the deer was determined to live and make itself hard to find so I shot it again while it was on the run. That second shot caused it to pile up under a pine tree in visual range.

The do have the right camo for where they live and can be nearly invisible if one is not paying attention. The myth of the bulletproof deer is dead,
 
Some people are deer shooters
Some are deer hunters.
Many lack the knowledge, skill or lets call it ....sophistication .

Does that make their sport, to them, less rich?

Heck being a detail/ technical freak.....my fun might be lesser than theirs.

If they have myths and other that enriches their experience, good for them.

I busted some old wives tails and other on some guys just being honest and......i feel kinda bad about it in retrospect.

One old timer went on and on about his Citori being made in Belgium, borrowed often from a family member. He told story after story on the way to the dove fields.

I corrected him and once there he pulls out the gun, the one he loved for years....and looks on the bbl. Whatdya know.....

Now he shot OK that day
Had I kept my mouth shut he might have shot better.
 
i grew up with a grandad and father hunting after ww-2 who hunted with 30-30 win and 35 rem rifles shooting regular cup-core factory shells and several deer a year were put on the table with out much fan fare. i was allowed to go on hunts starting in 1949 once i learned to keep still and keep my mouth shut( i learned woolrich was heavy when wet and didn,t smell very good). so i learned at a early age you didn,t need supper dupper bullet or rifles or cammo-scent killer to kill deer if you did your work, i don,t remember any shots much over 100 yards. i do have to admitt they were meat hunters and didn,t pass up many deer, if it had a nice rack ok, if not ok also. over the next 60 odd years i guess deer morphred into semi cape buffalo.
 
Deer are no less a mystical being than the rest of nature's offerings. People accomplish super-human feats on occasion, so why should we think deer aren't capable of super-deer feats? Granted, most misses and insufficient hits are the fault of the shooter. Most. I've never shot one with a rifle, but I've seen first hand a deer travel well over 500 yards that was double lung shot with a 12ga slug.

And there was the buck that left a solid trail of blood on both sides for 200+ yards, then a decent trail for about 400 yards. Then no trail at all, but was found about 1/4 mile downstream, dead on a riffle after trying to swim across a creek.

Funny thing about animals, including humans...spend your whole life trying to survive and it makes you wanna fight off death as long as possible.
 
Deer aren't mythical they are technologically savvy punks of the woods and it can be a real B!&*H to deal with up-armored Cervidaes. A few years ago I took two does in a single morning with my S&W 610 10mm Auto revolver, a 200gr 10mm hollowpoint bullet at slightly less than 700 ft-lbs of muzzle energy. Since that incident is has been a tit for tat arms race between me and the deer. The first year they tried face-hardened steel armor and I had to turned to 338 Lapua Mag with tungsten cored AP rounds. The next year they went ceramic composite and I answered with 50 BMG SLAP rounds. This past year they upgraded their composite armor with a passive armor appliqué package and I had to go to 20x102mm APDS to have a chance. Next year I was planning on going to 30x173mm DU but I might have to skip to something better. I finally turned one of the raccoons as a double agent to my side. That raccoon frequents the same deer feeder that deer-herd's maintenance manager frequents. From that masked bandit I learned the damn deer are sourcing a reactive armor upgrade package. To get ahead of the curve I am looking for tandem warhead TOW missiles. Was already considering some thing self-propelled since the recoil of the 20mm was really hard on the pintle mounts on my deer stands and I wasn't sure they would take the 30mm at all. The TOW would eliminate the recoil issue and deal with this new upgrade by the deer. Its really starting to take the fun out of deer hunting...

If they would just go back to normal hide I could go back to my lowly 10mm Auto...

:D
 
I have found that the most difficult part of deer hunting is that deer worth shooting often don't show up. When they do, I shoot them and they die. I usually do this with the ineffective calibers "they" say just won't work, like 243, 223, and subsonic 300 BLK. When these calibers DO work, it is purely due to luck and perfect shot placement, which I thought is what everyone was supposed to be doing anyway.
 
mcb said:
Deer aren't mythical they are technologically savvy punks of the woods and it can be a real B!&*H to deal with up-armored Cervidaes. A few years ago I took two does in a single morning with my S&W 610 10mm Auto revolver, a 200gr 10mm hollowpoint bullet at slightly less than 700 ft-lbs of muzzle energy. Since that incident is has been a tit for tat arms race between me and the deer. The first year they tried face-hardened steel armor and I had to turned to 338 Lapua Mag with tungsten cored AP rounds. The next year they went ceramic composite and I answered with 50 BMG SLAP rounds. This past year they upgraded their composite armor with a passive armor appliqué package and I had to go to 20x102mm APDS to have a chance. Next year I was planning on going to 30x173mm DU but I might have to skip to something better. I finally turned one of the raccoons as a double agent to my side. That raccoon frequents the same deer feeder that deer-herd's maintenance manager frequents. From that masked bandit I learned the damn deer are sourcing a reactive armor upgrade package. To get ahead of the curve I am looking for tandem warhead TOW missiles. Was already considering some thing self-propelled since the recoil of the 20mm was really hard on the pintle mounts on my deer stands and I wasn't sure they would take the 30mm at all. The TOW would eliminate the recoil issue and deal with this new upgrade by the deer. Its really starting to take the fun out of deer hunting...

If they would just go back to normal hide I could go back to my lowly 10mm Auto...

:D
Click to expand...
You need to fill Patrick MacManus's spot in story telling.
 
Inexperienced or ignorant hunters either blame their rifle, ammo or "difficult to kill" on thier own poor ability. Thus, the constant market for upgrading to the newest action/ round. Yet the antique yet well proven 30-30 still is one of the most popular of all rifles and rounds. I still to this day believe most hunters dont spend anywhere near the time sighting and practicing with their rifles they should. When they allowed rifles for almost all areas in NY no one looked back at slug guns.
 
I’ve never heard anybody refer to deer in this manner. Put enough bullet into the right organs and they die. Deer have been known to cover several yards even with solid hits, but I’ve never known anybody whom believed they were mythical or inherently hard to kill. Pigs are ten times the animal that deer are, but I don’t eat pigs, so I enjoy deer hunting much more.
 
How many "perfect shots" were bullets that had encountered something before striking deer?

Most times a good shot ends up w a short trail. But not always.

Were the lungs full of air when the projectile went through?
Was the deer just browsing at ease of just came in looking for a fight (maybe after just having been in one)?

I know a couple of deer I field dressed seemed to have the organs glued into them.
Other the stuff just flopped out.

Suspect there may be other tissue differences within species.


BTW, I like 200gr in a .35 rem ;)
 
Foster slugs can do really weird things. I slammed a 9 pointer from a high treestand, not far away.
Slug should have entered back of ribcage near spine and come out at front of shoulder opp side, low.

Nope. It hit and slid to the back of its skull. Took out the loin all the way.

Of course since he dropped at the shot, and that wasn't a normal reaction, I popped him through the lungs as he laid there, just in case.


Had great luck w WW HI Supreme sabot slugs. Deer would buckle w medium height double lung hits. Impressive.

Called in an 9 and shot him at 12 steps, from the ground. Quartering to.
Hit was on front of shoulder, and he jumped high, and ran down into the swamp, stopped at 75 yards and just stood there, w his head down.
I shot again and he folded.

Only one in and out at the front end. Hmmmmm.

Nope, the 2nd shot exited where the first went in. The first shot stopped under the hide at the back of the opp side ham.
12 ga, slammer slug, folds deer.................and this 150# 8 pt takes the full impact, and runs 75 yards and stands there.

Proly was about to fall over when I popped him again.

But still, he toughed it out better than any other hit with that slug.

At least the variability keeps it interesting.
 
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Only once have I actually lost a deer. One other the deer went onto land I had been told to stay off of (to not find their pot patch). The one I lost was dead the second I pulled the trigger. Hit hard, did that weird arched back stiff legged trot for the thickest part of the woods. I lost blood trail after an hour and 2 creek crossings. Beagle found him a month later. The one that ran to off limits property was pumping blood and should have been done but I didn’t wait long enough and I pushed her rather than letting her bed down and die. I learned a lesson on that deer.

So, out of 40ish deer I have used everything from a .357, to 10mm to .44 handguns, 256 win mag to 308 via .270 and .243 among others. They all fell over after the bang. Not to mention a few falling over after a bowstring twang. There is no magic, and nothing really special about a whitetail except for how smart and how wary an old buck gets.
 
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