Thread: Deer with 223
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Old December 13, 2011, 09:23 AM   #19
Picher
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Join Date: December 14, 2004
Location: Maine
Posts: 3,694
One or two lucky shots with inferior bullets and relatively low-powered cartridges don't mean that every future shot will result in a quick kill. If a person must hunt moderate to larger deer with a .223 Rem (or other cartridge with similar projectile/energy) I hope they'd use the best deer-sized game bullets available. Nosler Partitions and Barnes TSX would be high on my list.

Kill zones and killing shot angles are more limited with lighter projectiles because they can more easily be rendered ineffective, especially by bone impact, than more powerful generally-recognized deer rounds. Head shots are particularly risky because it's a small target that moves more than any other part of the animal.

Quartering shots should also be passed up with smaller projectiles. Going-away shots are usually a bad idea for any bullet, but much worse with a light bullet. I've seen a hind-quarter shot that made a mess of a hindquarter, but the small doe managed to run a half-mile, only to be killed by someone from another party...who kept it. A fellow hunter (B-I-L) hadn't followed instructions. Although I'd stopped using it myself, that episode resulted in shelving the .22-250 Rem for deer hunting. The experience caused the guy to never hunt again. A 30-06 and a good deer bullet would probably have killed the deer with that relatively poor shot.

Carefully placed shots in the lower neck or heart/lung, from a .223 Rem, using good game bullets at reasonable range (preferably under 200 yards) should be fine. Professional deer-management contractors in Maine successfully use .223 Rem rounds with silenced rifles and night-vision scopes at reasonably short range (over bait). Your results may vary.
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