Blood trailing in the rain

[WSU]

Good deal! Where did you hit it?

[blackveltbowhunter]

Way to go! tup:  Way to stick with it until you knew you gave full effort! Congrats!

[dilleytech]

Rotten meat is not meat I care to find.

Unless you’re shooting deer in September most deer that die by liver shot are going to live 8-12 hours. You wait to find them you’ll actually find them, and they’ll be expired a short amount of time and meat will not be spoil. Even in September, if you shoot them in the evening and wait till morning they’re still going to be good. Rushing to track a liver/gut shot animal is almost always going to end in not recovering an animal.

Every animal I have shot in the liver died within 10 minutes and didn’t go more than 60 yards. They bleed out very fast from a liver hit. Unless you barely scratch it or something.

[WSU]

Rotten meat is not meat I care to find.

Unless you’re shooting deer in September most deer that die by liver shot are going to live 8-12 hours. You wait to find them you’ll actually find them, and they’ll be expired a short amount of time and meat will not be spoil. Even in September, if you shoot them in the evening and wait till morning they’re still going to be good. Rushing to track a liver/gut shot animal is almost always going to end in not recovering an animal.

Every animal I have shot in the liver died within 10 minutes and didn’t go more than 60 yards. They bleed out very fast from a liver hit. Unless you barely scratch it or something.

I shot a bull once in the liver with a muzzleloader and finished it off about 6 hours and a mile later.

[Feathernfurr]

Rotten meat is not meat I care to find.

Unless you’re shooting deer in September most deer that die by liver shot are going to live 8-12 hours. You wait to find them you’ll actually find them, and they’ll be expired a short amount of time and meat will not be spoil. Even in September, if you shoot them in the evening and wait till morning they’re still going to be good. Rushing to track a liver/gut shot animal is almost always going to end in not recovering an animal.

Every animal I have shot in the liver died within 10 minutes and didn’t go more than 60 yards. They bleed out very fast from a liver hit. Unless you barely scratch it or something.

I shot a bull once in the liver with a muzzleloader and finished it off about 6 hours and a mile later.

I’ve killed multiple elk and deer with 1 lung and center punched liver, with big mechanical and fixed broadheads. The farthest one has taken it 950 yards. Liver is not a quick death unless you clip a large artery with it. They will carry it 150-200 yards and bed and die.

[kodiak06]

Rotten meat is not meat I care to find.

Unless you’re shooting deer in September most deer that die by liver shot are going to live 8-12 hours. You wait to find them you’ll actually find them, and they’ll be expired a short amount of time and meat will not be spoil. Even in September, if you shoot them in the evening and wait till morning they’re still going to be good. Rushing to track a liver/gut shot animal is almost always going to end in not recovering an animal.

Every elk and deer we've hit in the liver have died in less than an hour. My sons bull this year was dead 40min after the shot when we found him.

[Dark2Dark]

[/quote]

Every elk and deer we've hit in the liver have died in less than an hour. My sons bull this year was dead 40min after the shot when we found him.
[/quote]

I think with any of these comments it's valuable/important to mention whether you are talking about archery hunting or rifle hunting. Of course, the OP is talking about rifle hunting so it would be natural to throw in rifle scenarios as most relevant. But we definitely have some archery stories being included.

There is a pretty big difference between slicing the liver a little with an arrow and blowing it up with an expanding bullet and the associated concussion. A bullet could reasonably turn most of the liver into jello, and open up all the arteries going to and from it. That could definitely be a pretty quick death.

With an arrow, it's pretty well-documented that a liver hit can take hours and hours to kill an animal, and I have seen it happen several times. Archery situations are also quite a bit different because if it's going to take the animal four hours to die, you better give it four hours. Because if you bump it, it's highly unlikely you're getting a follow-up shot with a bow. Whereas, jumping it with a rifle isn't the end of the world because odds are high/good you can put another round in it to finish the job.

With basically any rifle hit on public property, especially in the rain, I don't typically wait around before pursuing a hit animal. Maybe I should, but the only rifle-hit animal I have lost remains a huge mystery- it was pouring rain but I'm pretty sure the hit was good and I found about a 1" piece of lung that blew out of his chest cavity. It was a big spike buck and to this day I have no idea where he ended up or how I couldn't find him.