Head shots
Dominique Morel
Well it looks like I started a real arguement there. First the rifle
was not a 338 Win Mag but a .458 Win Mag developing 4920 foot pounds
of energy with the 500 grain softpoint at 2100 fps. Secondly the shot
was aimed a bit low 2" below the line between the eyes. The shot ended
up 2.5" at 7 oclock of the center of the eyes. That makes it about
.75" away from aiming point. The shot was aimed there so as not to
kill the steer strait away but to knock it unconsious so that we could
bleed him. As he was worth about $700.00 we wanted a good kill for
the freezer and a brain shot would have stopped its heart making the
meat more gamey than we wanted. The reason that the beast was killed
rather than sold at the abbatoirs was that it was too wild to catch.
It was one of those that either ran away as soon as a horseman was
within a couple of hundred meters of the beast or worse charged the
horseman. We drove one hundred and thirty mile to the station to shoot
that particular beast. We knew to within a four mile of where the
beast was and if we did not find it we would not shoot an other.
Vaughn whom took the shot knows his rifle and is a good shot. The
rifle is a Ruger 77 action and stock with a shilen barrel, the
original ruger barrel was too rough for Vaughn so he rebarreled it
himself. It wears a 1.5 power scope and I can bench rest it to just
over 1 MOA. If the beast had been running he would not have gone for
the head shot; he would have gone for the lung shot which would have
bleed the beast internally (all the blood would flowed into its lungs
and chest cavity).
Personally I go for the head shot if I can and the range is less than
150 meters. The only time I did not kill an animal strait away was
when I was out west hunting feral goats. I came across a nanny with a
young kid. I aimed for the head of the kid because I was after meat
and young goat is much nicer than old goat. The bullet was of by a
couple of inches and I hit it in the base of the inch long horns. The
bullet then hit the mother in the hind quaters wounding both. The
mother dropped and the kid stood completely stunned. The second shot
was a head shot on the mother and the third was a head shot on the
kid. I was using a 222 mag at the time so I had to go for either neck
or head shots as I do not trust such a small caliber for game the size
of a goat on sholder shots. The same place a couple of years before
that I shot a goat in the sholder with a 22-250, but the goat was
running and I did not give it enough lead and the bullet hit about 8"
to far back it took me five miles of tracking to get the second shot
in it. The seven mile hike back to camp with a goat over my sholder in
38 degree (celcius) heat was very much a chore. Since I avoid shooting
at moving game as much as I can. Though I do not hesitate at taking a
Texas heart shot on pigs that are running away if I am carring my .375
H & H magnum. I know that tha bullet will go deep enough to do the
damage required to make it an almost sure one shot kills.
I have on one occasion put two shot into a pig that was running across
a very large clearing both were to far back to kill, but upon tracking
him it turned to charge. I put a 300 grain Sierra spitzer boat tail
driven at 2650 fps between the eyes from about 7 metres. It did the
job that the other two did not succeed in doing. That was ten years
ago. Since I have had only a couple occasions that a second shot on a
pig was required, and I lost it. We came across a mob of about 15 pigs
I shot the first saw it go down; shot a second one saw it cut in half
(it was only about 600 millimetres long) and the followed the mob
across a creek and I found one more shot it with a Texas heart shot
(between the hams through the gut into the heart lung area, if the
animal is small the bullet exits at the base of the neck). Upon
comming back the first pig was nowhere to be found there was no blood
to follow and a hour of tracking failed to locate any trace of the
pig. It was getting dark so we headed home. Even though pigs here are
vermin that we treat with contempt I felt guilty for not checking to
see if I need a second shot. The pig was found three days later with
one of its hind legs missing and starting to recover there was no sign
of infection and it would probably have survived if the people who own
the place had not spotted it.
Before I got any large calibers I used to hunt with a shotgun and a
.22 magnum Savage bolt action with a four power scope. I went out and
bought my .375 in 1978 when a big boar just kept on running after
being hit with a load of SG's from about 20 meters. (SG I think that
is called 00 buck shot in America, nine pellets for an 1.125 onces of
shot.) I now own a rifle for most occasions and I always use more than
enough gun to be as humane as possible to the game.
I feel that if one has time to take a well aimed shot then the head
shot is the best otherwise go for a heart/lung shot with enough gun to
get to the area by smashing the through the whole of the beast that
one is hunting if neccessary. If game that you are not prepared for
shows itself, then one should not that the shot.
Last weekend I went out to the reef fishing; it had been nine years
since had been out there. I went with my old spearfishing buddy, he
has got a new boat much less impressive than his previous boats, but
still capable of doing the 30 - 50 nautical miles to get to the good
spots. Last weekend we fished by line and I ended up with about 10
kilogrammes of fillets, but as soon as the weather get a bit warmer we
shall go spearfishing. Today it got to 32 degrees so it will not be
long before the seas are warm enough to spend a couple of hours at a
time in them. I shall tell you of the great hunting under the seas of
Queensland where one sometimes becomes the hunted. (Sharks make life
interesting.)
Dominique Lucien Morel.