“Dad told me pop would always shoot them in the head. That may or may not be true but thats the story.”
JP, I believe your Pop.
So now we know there’s honesty in the bloodline……..somewhere. Sometimes it skips a generation, they say.
Ha ha, ha……. You set that one up too well to not take a swipe at it……. Just teasing ya JP…… don’t burn my house down tonight, okay….
I went through a period of head shooting almost everything. When my kids were young and money was hard to come by I was mostly a meat hunter. In the last 70’s and 80’s after I’d started mostly muzzleloader hunting I found myself chasing wounded deer and elk for hours and even days, for both myself and other muzzleloading buddies…….. too dang often. We were all shooting Hawken style open sight round balls, a 100 yards or less… kind of stuff. After too many nights out with a lantern, looking for a wound deer, I made an executive decision. No more body shots on anything, it’s a head shoots or nothing. I figured……… they die, where they stand or they leave unscathed. I’m not tracking another wounded critter all day or night.
Never regretted it. I missed a few but not many. And……. it actually seemed to improve my accuracy……… May have been that “aim small, hit small” sort of thing.
As wobbly as I am now days, maybe I should do back to that…….accept I haven’t meat hunted for years…….. Bullets are not great on antlers…..I’ve found that to be true, a time or two as well.