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| Copyright 2012 by Jackson Landers |
I'm going to say right up front that I believe new deer hunters should hunt with the most powerful cartridge that they can comfortably shoot, up to a .30-'06. Lighter cartridges are more properly thought of as expert tools.
The .22 LR fires a very small projectile at fairly low speed. Usually a bullet of around 30-40 grains moving at around 1,200-1,500 feet per second out of the muzzle. Those bullets aren't engineered to hold together well enough to punch completely through a deer's body. On a standing broadside, a .22 LR bullet might very well punch into one lung, fracture into a dozen fragments, and fail to penetrate the other lung. Such a deer would never be recovered by the hunter.
And yet the .22 LR has accounted for a great many dead deer. The .22 LR is now illegal for use on deer in most states, but many old timers still have stories.
I have personally taken one deer with a .22 LR, though it was under duress and I wouldn't exactly call it a fair-chase hunt. Last summer I was preparing to deliver a series of lectures and workshops at the annual Mother Earth News Fair. I had been asked to demonstrate basic DIY butchering techniques, including how to break up a whole venison hindquarter into steaks and roasts. In order to do this in early October (before deer season around here) I needed whole venison hindquarters, necessitating a trip to what was then the only deer farm in Virginia.
The owner of the only deer farm in Virginia had some requirements. First, she only wanted me to use a .22 to harvest a deer. The loud noise of larger guns tended to bother the other deer for days afterward and made them more difficult to handle. Second, it had to be a brain shot. No suffering to the animal whatsoever. Just turn off the central nervous system instantly.
It happened that I was having some trouble with my primary scoped .22 bolt action rifle that day. The only other .22 with a zeroed scope that I happened to have lying around was my daughters pink NEF single-shot Handi-Rifle.
So there I was sitting on the ground in front of the fence about forty yards away from a herd of deer with this ridiculous pink rifle propped up on my shooting sticks. Oh, and there also happened to be a camera crew there to film me for a documentary. The only thing worse than being watched by God-only-knows how many thousands of people with this pink girl's rifle would be missing my shot with it. For so many different reasons at once, I absolutely had to make that shot a perfect kill.
The herd was restless. About eighty deer moved around like a school of fish. They all had ear tags and certain colors of tag were off-limits. I had to mind the tags, but I also couldn't take a shot on a skylined deer for safety's sake, and I couldn't take a deer that had another deer behind it. And they moved constantly. I only had about a second or two to size up any given shot opportunity before it was gone.
Finally the moment came with a fat doe paused in front of a hillside. The deer behind it moved out of the way and I centered the crosshairs over that spot where I knew that the brain lies and I exhaled slowly and squeezed the trigger as the air came out.
If you must be the guy hunting deer with a little girl's pink rifle, you had better also be the guy who drops it in one shot like the proverbial ton of bricks.
The deer dropped and never got up again.
That tiny 40 grain bullet will really do a serious rearrangement on the skull of a deer. A heart-lungs shot with the .22 is iffy (although I know people who have managed it), but in a properly-placed brain shot the .22 LR is a sure kill.
Properly-placed brain shots are expert shots, however. To accomplish a brain shot properly, the hunter must have a firm grasp of both anatomy and of deer behavior. This comes with time spent in the field watching deer, and with experience in dissecting deer and in examining their craniums in 3D.
You will sometimes see braggarts in online hunting forums boasting of their specialty in head shots, trumpeting that 'you either hit clean or miss clean.' This claim is a total lie and reeks of a failure to understand basic anatomy.
If you look at the skull of a deer you will notice that the brain case represents a very small percentage of the whole thing. In profile, I would estimate that the brain accounts for no more than 25% of the total silhouette. Much of the volume of a deer's head is actually the sinuses -- a necessary trait in an animal with such a keen sense of smell. A shot to the snout or jaw will result in a horribly wounded animal that you will never catch up with. It will die days later of some combination of thirst, starvation and infection. Head shots are risky business.
Next time you find a deer skull in the woods (they are everywhere when you start looking), clean it up and put it on a book shelf. Look at it often. You will memorize its features. Then try to get a sense of the rhythms with which deer move. At what point is the head going to go up or down? Experience will be the best teacher of this.
Marksmanship is the final component. To make a good head shot on a deer you need much better marksmanship than what is required for a heart-lungs shot with a 'real' deer cartridge. You need to be able to consistently put your bullets into a 2x3 inch oval at whatever distance you plan on taking the shot at. In field positions, without a shooting bench, and with only a few seconds to get steady and make the call.
This is a whole other league from most deer hunting.
I cannot recommend the .22 LR for hunting deer, and I do not argue with the states that ban its use on deer. Yet I also do not disagree with those old-timers who talk about the deer they took with the .22 many decades ago before the bans were put in place. In the hands of a talented enough hunter, it almost doesn't matter what cartridge she uses.
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