Saturday, February 11, 2006
Check Deer For Injuries Before Shooting
Many years ago I was hunting an area on my ranch, long before it was fenced in, and I kept seeing this really nice buck. I had the feeling that something was wrong with the animal.
I glassed it with binoculars and even a spotting scope, studied it from all angles, and didn’t want to waste my tag on it if the buck had been wounded. There was no noticeable limp, no legs dragging, and no apparent sign the buck was hurt.
Still, a niggling thought kept coming back to me: this buck is hurt. Should I shoot it?
Too many questions and no logical answers. The next day I sat in a tree stand overlooking a nearby trail. I’d seen the buck travel both ways on the trail, and the only thing that I hung my suspicions on, was the fact that this buck seemed to move too slow to be in good health.
I’d been in the tree for an hour when I saw him walk out of a marsh. Tall marsh grass covered most of his body but beautiful points stood high above his head. He moved slowly, and didn’t appear to favor either leg, but the more I watched him, they greater my feeling that this buck was in pain.
He approached my stand, and the wind was in my favor. He hung back, and two or three does and fawns, squirted past my stand, and he stood motionless for 10 minutes. The other deer were out of sight when he decided to step out into the open.
Each step was slow and methodical, a study in caution. He stayed screened by brush for long minutes as he took a step or two, stopped and studied the terrain all around him. He acted as if he had been shot at before by a bow hunter, and wasn’t taking any chances of it happening again.
Apparently satisfied, he took two or three more steps, and exposed his vitals to a broadside shot. I waited, and he turned his head in the direction that the does and fawns had traveled, and I eased back to full draw and made a smooth release.
The aluminum arrow sliced in low behind his front shoulder, hitting the heart and lungs, and his back legs kicked backward as it appeared to hump up slightly, and off he ran out of sight. I heard the buck go down, and it was a simple trailing job. I followed the Game Tracker line, and found the buck dead 70 yards away.
I field dressed the animal, and the meat near his shoulder was green. I kept skinning him out on that side, and the more hide I removed, the more green tissue I found.
This deer had gangrene all through its body, and even though there was no reason to suspect it was ill, a further autopsy proved the cause. The buck had been hit high in the shoulder, and the three-blade replaceable-blade broadhead had broken apart on impact.
The hunter that had originally shot the buck had been hunting from a tree stand, and the broadhead had penetrated until the replaceable blades impacted on the shoulder. I kept skinning, and eventually found the tip and three broadheads buried under the hide.
The buck had been hit several days before, and it was in a spot where the animal couldn’t like the wound, and it just got sicker and sicker by the day. The hunter couldn’t recover the buck because it wasn’t hurt that bad, but as time went on, infection set in.
This buck walked normally, didn’t favor the leg on that side, and it wasn’t the broadhead that would have eventually killed that buck if I hadn’t shot it, but it was slowly dying from infection.
The buck was useless to me or anyone else, and I informed the DNR about the animal, and they said to leave it to the coyotes. Outdoor writer Dave Richey happened to be there that day, took photos of the broken broadhead, and two days later the coyotes had reduced the animal to bones and hair.
A deer, hit in a non-vital area that it can lick and keep clean, will almost always survive. It’s such animals as this that become almost impossible to hunt. I’ve killed many deer that have been wounded by other people, and in many cases the deer would have survived.
A wounded deer doesn’t always die. In fact, studies have shown that if blood loss is kept to a minimum, and no internal organs or major blood vessels are hit, the chances of recovery are good.
Know this, though. A deer that recovers from an arrow would is one savvy animal. Shooting and killing that deer can be a major challenge.—The Whitetail Wizard