Hunting slug in 44 mag....

[chaos]

As you fellas that been with the site know, Im a relative noobie at casting slugs. Been shooting home brewed slugs for about 2 years now, give or take.

I have two good moulds for my 44 mag. Both RCBS. A 44-240-swc and a 44-250-KT.

Both of these slugs produce wonderful accuracy from my revolers, with the slight edge going to the gas checked 44-240-swc.

Over the last couple of years, I have taken more wild hogs, feral hogs with both bullets than I've cared to keep track of. I always place the shot in the boiler room and they bleed like stuck pigs. Some are even DRT. Its rare for me to loose a hog with either of these slugs. Works great I make 'em from WDWW with nothing added.

My question comes about taking deer with these slugs. I have only killed one deer in the last 10 years as my interest in Deer faded. I still try and put my two young sons on good bucks every year with pretty good success.

I took this buck with a single shot with one of the two of those slugs right after I started casting my own. Shot was perfect. Right behind the shoulder. The buck ran like the wind at the shot and left ZERO blood trail. He only went about 40 yards, but its the thickest scrub West Texas has to offer. I was lucky that I ever found the buck .
http://i151.photobucket.com/albums/s132/colbcheese/cull.jpg


I've decided to take a few bucks this season so:

Is this normal for deer to not bleed at all? Are my slugs too hard? (Penciled right through). Should I shoot them ON the shoulder to try and get bone? Freak occurance?

I dont understand how the same shot on hogs produces enough blood trail for even Ray Charles to follow. The only blood I found from this buck was laying under the carcass. Decimated the top of his heart and punched his lungs. i dont think I clipped a rib on entrance or exit. Can't remember.

My guns like these slugs so well, I'd hate to have to go back to jacketed slugs.....

Any help is appreciated,

Chaos


I've got 4 months to make any necessary changes and get my guns on.

[OBXPilgrim]

If I had best accuracy with a GC boolit and could air cool it & not cause any issues, I do it. That was my first thought on reading your post. I'm sure you'd get better expansion with softer. I know I like to use straight WW also, but hear of some adding soft pb to the mix.

How fast are you pushing them - got room to go softer?

[Bass Ackward]

Is this normal for deer to not bleed at all? Are my slugs too hard? (Penciled right through). Should I shoot them ON the shoulder to try and get bone? Freak occurance?

I dont understand how the same shot on hogs produces enough blood trail for even Ray Charles to follow. The only blood I found from this buck was laying under the carcass. Decimated the top of his heart and punched his lungs. i dont think I clipped a rib on entrance or exit. Can't remember.

Any help is appreciated,


Real complicated questions that are fairly simple to answer if you understand physiology and my explanation. Blood has a natural clotting agent in it that if there is enough shock, you trigger this eruption that clots blood for a certain time / distance. Had this deer gone another 10, 20, 50 yards he would have been bleeding well.

So the answer is that you produced too much shock for instant blood. Why? And was that a problem though? On pig which has much more dense muscle, you get less cutting effect from the meplat and the shock is better absorbed without being transfered, so blood cells rupture less and flows freely.

I find this pretty much symptomatic of hard slugs with meplats.

You can do some work with water filled milk jugs lined up as this is all I can relate to. It has been what I used to develop my stuff for better than 40 years.

From my experience, what you want to see is the first two to rupture and the rest to just have a hole poked. Start busting three and you either need to slow the velocity, soften the bullet, drop the meplat size, change your shot angle, or extend the minimum range out. How close this occurs becomes your minimum shooting range with this combo.

What you will find when using hard bullets is that you get a minimum working range and then you will have to test out to reach a distance where you DON'T explode the first two. That is your maximum working range for that combo.

Operate between those two ranges and you will be happy. Closer you can still be good, but don't expect blood on a reliable basis. The max range is just that, regardless of sighting systems employed. You will have blood, but not enough shock to bring swift demise.

In essence, you min and max ranges change with the chosen shot angles and material density of the game animal. You can still kill obviously on either end as you saw, but prediction and reliability of results becomes erratic. This answer is NOT and end all and applies only because you said that you wanted blood trails.

[MT Gianni]

I think Bass hit it on the head. If you have a close range shot with the load you have try to break the opposite shoulder.

[MJR007]

Wonder deer and well done! 40 yards with any bullet is very good.

[Dannix]

chaos, some of the comments in these threads may be helpful further reading for you.
Gates Extreme Meplat Bullets (http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?t=48098)
Questions about HP Boolits (http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?t=88280)


That's a really interesting post Bass Ackward. I've never heard of this before. I've read a good bit here about terminal damage here, but I guess there's distinct difference between pure terminal damage and terminal damage + followable blood trail.

Posted by Bass Ackward From my experience, what you want to see is the first two to rupture and the rest to just have a hole poked. Start busting three and you either need to:

slow the velocity
soften the bullet
drop the meplat size
change your shot angle
extend the minimum range out
How close this occurs becomes your minimum shooting range with this combo.

Would this situation be a good candidate for a HPing, looking for Partition-like results? This would bias the would channel towards an initial greater wound channel, within your 2-jug spec I would image, right? But perhaps this would increase your minimum working range at the expense of your maximum working range? I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this.

[chaos]

I understand what you are saying Bass. The minimum range is something that is going to be hard for me to control as in this thick scrub, one has to hunt the openings and take the shots as they present
themselves. I will certainly try your experiments and make adjustments to what you have listed that falls under my control.
You ask if the blood trail is really that important? I do understand that dead is dead, but with no blood trail in this terrain, one might as well close his eyes after the shot. I have no problems placing the shot where it needs to go. I just felt like a
Blind man on my hands and knees for what seemed like an eternity.

What you say makes sense and I will read the articles others suggested. These slugs drop swine as good or even cleaner than my 45-70 or 300 win mag.

I load them over a dose of 296 that falls right in
The middle of the small spectrum of my manuals.

[Bass Ackward]

Would this situation be a good candidate for a HPing, looking for Partition-like results? This would bias the would channel towards an initial greater wound channel, within your 2-jug spec I would image, right? But perhaps this would increase your minimum working range at the expense of your maximum working range? I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this.



Remember, this is in reference to blood trails.

In a 44 Mag, Hping will extend out the minimum close range out and the long range max out if velocity is kept equal. Hping is in effect increasing meplat size, just using impact to do it. So as in this example, if you need to decrease meplat size as one of the options, then Hping is counter to that.

The problem with this game is that animal density alters everything. Shot angles alters everything. The REAL PROBLEM is being able to translate what you see / experience in the field without having to shoot 50 of something to draw conclusions.

There are many options for this, and I chose water filled jugs. It can give you a visual indication of shock up front and aid in bullet penetration and recovery in sort of game like conditions as we are all mostly water. If you want to hit or simply worry about bone contact, you can get a comparable size bone, place the bone in front of the first jug and put wet news print of a certain thickness that simulates distance in to that bone. I spray paint the bones location on the front of all this for a POA.

The more penetration you want, the less bursting you generally want to see occur. Counters are heavy caliber, heavier bullets, etc. Essentially all the things we control.

Cheap and it works for a dummy like me anyway.

[44man]

I use a WLN of WD WW in the .44 and have taken a pile of deer with them. Blood trails have been enormous. I do like a heavy boolit though, from 265 to 330 gr.
Using these boolit types, including some WFN designs out of all of my calibers at different velocities has shown me a lot.
When the speed is around 1100 fps, deer take a little longer to die, internal damage is a little less but they cut everything they touch.
At around 1350 fps internal damage is very great with a lot of blood on the ground and deer hardly ever make 30 yards.
As velocity goes up, damage gets less and less and at 1600+ deer can go 200 yards or more with little blood on the ground for quite a while.
At the lower and higher velocities some nose expansion is really needed. At the 1350 fps spot a very hard boolit can be used.
A hard boolit at 1100 fps has always worked for me but the reaction of the deer is different, some jumping and walking off, others just stand there or lay down. I need to wait a while for them to bleed out. This is close to an arrow effect but not quite as good.
The .44 at the proper velocity will either pitch a deer on it's nose or they run like crazy and run into the ground fast. These deer run a trail.
Deer hit with the .475 at that velocity with hard boolits either drop or run into trees and brush piles, not knowing where they are going at all. They crash in sight.
Bass makes a lot of good points but if you are getting the accuracy at the velocity you shoot, it is better to tailor the alloy.
I went too far with the 45-70 last season by both using a 50-50 alloy, oven hardened and a hollow point with one of Babore's great boolits, I destroyed the off shoulder and the deer was blood shot on the whole side. Just going from a useless hard boolit, I wound up with a "BOMB". :veryconfu
Those boolits Chaos is using are OK but might need an alloy change for his velocity. You just need to learn from results and change something if it is not correct, a thing us cast boolit shooters have in our hands without resorting to buying those "J" things. [smilie=w:

[44man]

The more penetration you want, the less bursting you generally want to see occur. Counters are heavy caliber, heavier bullets, etc. Essentially all the things we control.
Not entirely true Bass. A good caliber will burst more jugs then you think while penetrating to no end.
How about blowing 4 sky high, splitting two more and going through 14 jugs of water?
The result of the proper velocity and boolit weight using a very hard boolit of 22 to 25 BHN.

[Bass Ackward]

I understand what you are saying Bass. The minimum range is something that is going to be hard for me to control as in this thick scrub, one has to hunt the openings and take the shots as they present
themselves. I will certainly try your experiments and make adjustments to what you have listed that falls under my control.
You ask if the blood trail is really that important? I do understand that dead is dead, but with no blood trail in this terrain, one might as well close his eyes after the shot. I have no problems placing the shot where it needs to go. I just felt like a
Blind man on my hands and knees for what seemed like an eternity.

What you say makes sense and I will read the articles others suggested. These slugs drop swine as good or even cleaner than my 45-70 or 300 win mag.

I load them over a dose of 296 that falls right in
The middle of the small spectrum of my manuals.


Trust me, I understand. It's like that here. Can't tell you how many times I have been on all fours crawling through stuff and see deer several legs 10 to 12 feet in front of me slowly move away or around me. And that's all you ever see.

Had one occasion where my cousin was helping me about 15 yards away. We stood up to take a back break and stood there talking for the better part of two minutes and he shifted his weight when a branch sprung up in his face and stepped to the side and the darnedest noise and commotion took place as he went 5 feet in the air. Here a doe had been laying all that time waiting for him to pass and he stepped on her and upset her highly. We finally got the buck, but it took the dog to do it.

I just needed to elaborate so that others didn't think I was claiming this was "THE WAY" or "the ONLY way".

Without blood in certain locations here, if a deer runs 100 yards, there is a 50/50 chance you won't find or get it. Or you'll wait as you are supposed to and then hear a bang and someone else claims it.

That's why individual testing is so important to find. We all hunt differently and different requirements and expectations. Testing frees you from guessing errors. Works on all calibers as everything can have a minimum and definitely a maximum range with cast.

Easiest thing for you to do is soften the slug so the meplat wears away inside and probably slow down a little. Jugs'll tell ya.

[Bass Ackward]

The more penetration you want, the less bursting you generally want to see occur. Counters are heavy caliber, heavier bullets, etc. Essentially all the things we control.
Not entirely true Bass. A good caliber will burst more jugs then you think while penetrating to no end.
How about blowing 4 sky high, splitting two more and going through 14 jugs of water?
The result of the proper velocity and boolit weight using a very hard boolit of 22 to 25 BHN.


Can I have a break please. He asked about the 44 MAg. I didn't explain when you are using an 18" naval gun. True. :grin:

But as you are now starting to find out, all that bursting from a "good" caliber can be too much for deer too huh? :grin:

I remember that when I said that 10 years ago, I was laughed at till the cows came home. Not so funny now A?

[44man]

I love this picture. A .45 Colt at 1160 fps and a .475 at 1348 fps both going through a 16" tree. Neither was found in the ground after a lot of digging.

[44man]

Can I have a break please. He asked about the 44 MAg. I didn't explain when you are using an 18" naval gun. True. :grin:

But as you are now starting to find out, all that bursting from a "good" caliber can be too much for deer too huh? :grin:

I remember that when I said that 10 years ago, I was laughed at till the cows came home. Not so funny now A?
Not really, the .44 is a super caliber and can blow jugs yet have good penetration along with it if you match alloy to velocity.
I can not downplay one of the best calibers there is.
It ALWAYS comes down to bullet or boolit choice whether you use a .357 or .500.
Now the boolit that blew the jugs does not ruin meat, only internals like lungs or heart. Exit holes are not much larger then the boolit. A perfect balance so to say, only achieved by work in the field.
This deer had NO meat damage. Look at the exit hole in the shoulder.

[Larry Gibson]

chaos

Let me address another point, that being of bullet placement. You state you put the bullet into the "boiler room". That generally refers to the lungs(?). A hit behind the shoulder through the mid or top part of the lung many times makes for little bleed out regardles of the cartridge. The bleeding stays in the lungs and the deer actually drowns. Deer can travel some distance with such wounds. In open spaces or when snow covers the ground making tracking easy this isn't a problem. However as you have found, as I also found, that when hunting in really dense brush 40 yards can be a long way and can mean a lost deer.

A long time ago I changed from the behind the shoulder (boiler room) to a shot that puts the bullet through the heart/lung area. That area is low in the chest cavity between the deers legs. A bullet through there results in quicker death asnd less travel. Even if the heart is missed that location is rife with large blood vessals and the thickest part of the lungs. The wound will bleed profusely and being a lower hit the bolood will run out, many times spurt out. A heart hit also results in blood pressure to the brain being lost instantly and the brain shuts down quicker. This is not to say that some deer don't go when heart shot as there are they can. However, they will die quicker thus traveling less and will leave a blood trail.

Next time you look at a deer or a picture of one simply envision a soccor ball low agains the brisket between the front legs of the deer. Then regardless of the angle (my exception here is I do not take Texas heart shots;-) ) put the bullet through that soccor ball. On smaller deer, like the West Texas ones, a cantelope size area will do. Since using that shot I have not come even close to losing a deer and those that went any distance, less than 40 yards for sure, left a very good blood trail.

One last pointer I would suggest is that with your GC'd 240 gr bullet you cast them soft to get some expansion at your hunting distances. I use a 30/70 WW/lead alloy for my GC'd .44 magnum hunting bullets and even HP them with the Forster HP tool when smaller deer are hunted. The expansion kills quicker also. I push mine at 1400 fps out of a 6 1/2' barrel and suspect you could do at least that with your revolver. Very nice deer BTW:-)

While I can appreciate the ability to penetrate 6+ water filled jugs that kind of penetration is wasted on deer to say the least. I have yet to recover one of my soft cast HP bullets from a deer. They have all penetrated through and through from a variety of angles after hitting shoulders and ribs also. Yes hard cast bullets kill very well in the .44 especially as the picture of the heart shot deer carcus shows. However, in my experience the softer cast, GC'd expanding bullet will kill quicker. To some it is not an issue. To me, who has lost one deer and almost lost another in similar circumstance to yours, it is an issue. I prefer to quill them as quick as possible.

Just some additional food for thought.

Larry Gibson

[44man]

Good points Larry but there is NO WASTE with penetration as long as the boolit does the job in the animal and two holes are always better then one.
Energy dump is a fairy tale that animals fail to grasp. Just make the boolit work and it does not matter if it goes 300 yards past the animal.
Muzzle energy is also a fairy tale. Loading a boolit as fast as you can can fail.
I hate those bragging about super velocities thinking it kills better.

[fredj338]

I do not have the handgun hunting exp that some of the guys do, but I would think a heavy lead bullet w/ some deformation would make a greater wound channel. I had my Lyman Dev mold modified to a cup point. It performs well in wetpack. Hoepfully I'll get to try it on deer this fall. I'll probably move to a 20-1 alloy to slow expansion a bit more.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v703/fredj338/44-272.jpg

[Larry Gibson]

Good points Larry but there is NO WASTE with penetration as long as the boolit does the job in the animal and two holes are always better then one.
Energy dump is a fairy tale that animals fail to grasp. Just make the boolit work and it does not matter if it goes 300 yards past the animal.
Muzzle energy is also a fairy tale. Loading a boolit as fast as you can can fail.
I hate those bragging about super velocities thinking it kills better.

I don't disagree at all. My point was (not well stated) that many over worry about penetration in deer and thus extoll hard cast bullets over expanding ones for the sake of penetration. I was just rying to point out that penetration with an expanding bullet is more than sufficient for deer. We are on the same page of this hymn book:-)

Larry Gibson

[chaos]

Good stuff fellas. I appreciate all the comments and points of view. I do welcome more.

I guess I really need to spend more time testing and will need to drink a lot of milk.

Another caveat is finding a load that will work equally well on swine as hogs. This is not a problem on jacketed rifle rounds. I take every hog I see while deer hunting, which is sure to ruin more than a few
Hunts.

Larry, I just want to mention one thing. Texas is known for it's deer hunting. Small deer, with large racks. In my area, this is simply not the case. Western Texas has fewer deer and are generally larger than what this state is famous for. Two years ago, my son took a buck that was every bit of 200lbs. While this is not huge by some Northern standards, it's not the norm of the 105 lb gargantuan racked buck of the hill country that this state is known for.

I won't go and repost all the pics, but a quick search of my past posts will yield pics of some pretty heavy bucks, my sons have taken.

The buck that I posted a pic of..... I only took that deer because of his inferior genetics. My sons didn't want to take him because he was puny. I didn't want him to spread his seed. Plus, he taste just as good as any other deer i've eaten

My boys are a bit older now and can sit by themselves for the most part( The eldest one anyhow) . I can get away from pig duty and get myself back on some good deer.


I always appreciate reads from the likes of Larry Gibson, 44man, Bass ackwards and others who have been there and done that.

I will be shooting milk jugs in the near future and probably softening up my slugs. From my meager experience of hog slaying, I wouldnt think it would matter much going softer on them. I've taken my fair share of them with everything under the sun. They are not any harder to put down than a deer.
If for some reason one is lost, there are 7 million more to take his place and the number grows exponentially every day.


Chaos

[Larry Gibson]

Chaos

I was judging the deer by what I saw in central Texas on my deer hunt there last November. A 200 lb deer is a decent sized deer but I've shot numerous of them (Mule Deer) in eastern Oregon and even a couple mature Black Tails in the Willamette Valley will get that large. Most that were shot on license using a handgun were with the GC'd softer cast bullets in .357, .41 and .44 magnums, still no recovered bullets. As a LEO in NE Oregon I did dispatch numerous deer and elk over the years that were injured. I used a variety of weapons and can only recall a couple recovered bullets. They were mostly the real fast lightweight HPs. Most every thing else went clear through the deer from about any angle that I would have taken while hunting. Many times I was able to pick the distance and shot when dispatching them. I'll tell ya one thing, Keith style SWCs in the .44 Special, .45 ACP/AR and the .45 colt Cast of old WWs at 800 to 1050 fps are penetrating sons of a gun in deer. The only ones of those recovered were from straight on chest shots and the bullets ended up in the rear of the paunch or in the hams.

It was a lot of those different shots with different types of bullets that convinced me of the quicker killing capability of an expanding bullet vs a hard cast one given most everything else is equal. I'm not here arguing against hard cast bullets of Keith type or WFN type as they do kill pretty well. It's just that the expanding bullets were proven to me to kill quicker. Just a personal choice on my part. I've no qualms with anothers choice of hard cast bullets.

Larry Gibson

[Mk42gunner]

Good stuff fellas. I appreciate all the comments and points of view. I do welcome more.

I guess I really need to spend more time testing and will need to drink a lot of milk.

Another caveat is finding a load that will work equally well on swine as hogs. This is not a problem on jacketed rifle rounds. I take every hog I see while deer hunting, which is sure to ruin more than a few Hunts. ...


I will be shooting milk jugs in the near future and probably softening up my slugs. From my meager experience of hog slaying, I wouldnt think it would matter much going softer on them. I've taken my fair share of them with everything under the sun. They are not any harder to put down than a deer.
If for some reason one is lost, there are 7 million more to take his place and the number grows exponentially every day.


Chaos

Chaos,

While I don't have near the experience with cast boolits as any of the other responders, here are my thoughts:

Since you have a load that works well on hogs, and you intend to take every hog you see while hunting, that is the load I would use. When you see a deer that you want to shoot, break bone. It is hard for a whitetail to go very far when its shoulder is broken.

My self, if I shoot a deer and I can see that it is not laying down dead, I will shoot it again; I would rather lose a few pounds of blood shot meat than the whole deer. The last one I lost, I shot it with my brand new .35 Whelen, it went down and started spinning in circles, (looked like a helo spinning up). I couldn't get another shot as the bolt rode over the round in the magazine. To make a long story short, the buck got into a ten acre patch of horseweeds that were about eight feet high, you couldn't see a deer on the ground unless you stepped on it.

I don't know about the rest of you guys, but I remember the ones that got away more clearly than the ones that got into the freezer.

Robert

[Lloyd Smale]

Larry hit on it with his post. A higher lung hit will give you bleading that stays in the body cavity. that and consider that a pig runs and it takes quite a few steps to make 40 yards. A dear will cover the first 40 yards in a few leaps. Ive had deer shot in the boileroom with 300 weatherbys that didnt bleed for the first 50 yards. Many of them shot with 24 and 25 cal rounds that went alot farther then that without bleading. Then you get into something as big as a bufflalo and more times then not the bleading will all stay inside no matter how far you chase them.

[chaos]

I understand what you guys are saying. From the photo of the buck, it looks like a high lung hit. I was shooting from an elevated position ( tower blind) overlooking a Sendero ( narrow clear cut in the scrub). The exit was quite a bit lower. The entrance and exit wounds look identical. Kind of like shooting a deer with a field or target point on an arrow I presume.

[44man]

Good, good, good answers. Expansion does kill faster but adjust it to still make two holes. Hard boolits only work in a narrow range. Right now only my .44 and .475 fit that to perfection.

[Bass Ackward]

See why I got specific? All you have to do is go into a gun shop and look at all the calibers and all the bullets made and sold and realize that they are being sold because somebody is buying.

With each one comes the reason .... why? Testing allows you to answer this for yourself.

The only constant is that once a minimum working power level is obtained, (notice I didn't specify caliber or bore diameter) more power, more penetration, more expansion only serve to extend the minimum effective range out away from you. If you are hunting in a limited range scenario, you lose by going to more than is required.

Jim's pictures are a good example. The one on the left is "more" or the range was too close. The right one is enough for that range. The right picture would have exploded the first two and penetrated at least three more at what ever the distance was going from my experience.

That's the goal. It's not meplat size. It's not bullet hardness. It's not velocity. It's not caliber or bullet weight or any of a hundred other things. An animal can't tell any of that stuff.

Those things are all tools to allow you to create .... "enough".

[44man]

See why I got specific? All you have to do is go into a gun shop and look at all the calibers and all the bullets made and sold and realize that they are being sold because somebody is buying.

With each one comes the reason .... why? Testing allows you to answer this for yourself.

The only constant is that once a minimum working power level is obtained, (notice I didn't specify caliber or bore diameter) more power, more penetration, more expansion only serve to extend the minimum effective range out away from you. If you are hunting in a limited range scenario, you lose by going to more than is required.

Jim's pictures are a good example. The one on the left is "more" or the range was too close. The right one is enough for that range. The right picture would have exploded the first two and penetrated at least three more at what ever the distance was going from my experience.

That's the goal. It's not meplat size. It's not bullet hardness. It's not velocity. It's not caliber or bullet weight or any of a hundred other things. An animal can't tell any of that stuff.

Those things are all tools to allow you to create .... "enough".
That is the way it is! :grin: Can't get any of it from a book and only field experience used to study directly is all that really works.
By the way, the deer was shot at about 55 yards.
Season is flying towards us again and I don't know where the year went. I still had a lot of meat so I would thaw a roast and cut a bunch into thin strips and dry them, just plain meat, for dog treats. The little kids love it.
Then the rest is cut into steaks for us to finish off so there are no left overs. Works great to thin the freezer.

[MakeMineA10mm]

Well, I can't find anything to argue with from 44Man, Bass, or Larry. I'll add some more food for thought:

Sounds like your worry is losing the animal. There are several answers to this:

#1 way to drop an animal in it's tracks is to take out it's central nervous system. Brain or spine in neck or above front shoulders. Dr. Martin Fackler of the FBI Wound Ballistic's Workshop fame (or infamy, depending on your point of view) and all the military/law enforcement snipers in the world, likewise acknowledge the Central Nervous System as an instant-incapacitating shot. For a sportsman, this is a controversial shot, because it's a very small target area, and the locations are far away from other humane places which produce a rapid kill. The only hunter I knew of who ever did this was my uncle who was a WWII combat vet, excellent shot, and took deer at close range with a very small rifle (22 Magnum). I can't recommend this shot due to humane sportsmanship issues, but it is a fact that fits the criteria.

My personal opinion is that the next best shot is breaking skeletal structure that inhibits or prevents running in the same zone/area as the heart-lung. The best description of this was Elmer Keith's. He advocated imagining a 3-D view of the internals of the animal and aiming for the heart at an angle that results in the bullet taking out one or both shoulders. In this case, the only bad shots are broadside or dead-ahead/astern, as the shoulders don't cross the sight-line to the heart in those instances. But, if you wait for the animal to take a few steps, graze a little more, move around, etc., it might present itself. A deer will still run with three legs, but not as far or as fast as it would have with 4 legs.

My last point is that I advocate for a big meplat. Don't care if it's a Keith, RNFP, or any variation of those itterations. The bigger the meplat, the bigger the entrance and exit wounds. Too high a velocity MAY effect this, as animal skin can be very resilient and elastic. Slower velocity seems to allow more of a cutting action of the hide vs. the high-velocity, which is why I agree with Bass' point about lowering velocity helping. Bullet weight, design, and hardness will still give you penetration, so don't worry about the velocity being lower.