I had a young man out (14) after his first buck and it happened. He had just shot a doe a while earlier and made a nervous barely killing shot at 60 yards. An 8 point shows up at 125 and I grunt it stopped and boom, he shoots. Another marginal shot and the animal is up on its front legs hooking it for the brush and I popped it with the 22-250 TC encore in the neck and put it down. I still feel guilty for backing him up on his first buck but am glad it didn't get across a fence where we couldn't go get him.

Better than losing the trophy of YOU'RE lifetime. Everybody needs help sometime! Even if you think at the time it was not right for the help,IF you got the help someone thought good enough about you to give it to you.

Its just not the same, if I made a good shot, and he shot thinking I didn't I would be pissed. I shot a deer from the side of my house last year, and there was no thrill in it. Even if I see a buck of a lifetime from my house I will not shoot it. I will blow some hogs away though. I will probably never pay for a guided hunt, so it really will never affect me anyway.

Take your two posts, in one you did something to keep an animal from being lost.

In the second you say you would feel cheated.

While from time to time there are exceptions because of an itchy trigger finger or too much enthusiasm and not enough experience on the part of the guide, a guide is not gonna shoot unless he has to.

A guide is not there to kill the clients game, a guide is there to help the client make a kill on the animal of the clients choice.

Regardless of some of the rhetoric and brow beating that has gone on with this topic, most folks have agreed that they do not want a wounded animal to get away and be lost, if it can be prevented.

With guides/outfitters that is usually a S.O.P., I don't shoot, unless the client can't make the follow up or me or the client one is fixing to be attacked.

It is when it is buddies hunting together as in Pyledrivers first post that things get squirrely.

That is where as someone else mentioned, there needs to be a game plan among buddies hunting together and everyone needs to stick to that game plan.

POINT. You had to start somewhere. BB gun maybe or if you were lucky .22. Who taught you to shoot it? Who was there to tell you how to shoot you're first deer? Where to aim? My granddad told me where to aim so many times on my first deer that I almost missed the deer even after a couple of years of coaching and shooting. I was 7 at the time I shot my first deer.Talk about pressure! It's not an EGO thing,but it is sometimes an ethical resposability!

Bad wording! ALWAYS AN ETHICAL RESPOSABILITY!!!!!

I started on my own, my Dad didn't hunt.

I have to disagree about the "Ego Thing" observation.

That is why women and kids can most times shoot circles around a man.

A MAN has something to prove to himself/whoever is watching the list goes on.

A woman or a kid don't care, in fact they figure they are going to miss and so does the Dad or Husband or Boyfriend.

I mean afterall, I Am A Man And I Have To Shoot Good.

Women and kids don't have to prove anything to anyone.

No one was there when I shot my first deer, I was 20 years old and I was out deer hunting my very first time and got lucky enough to walk up on a deer and make a 150 or 160 yard off-hand shot.

It was an 8 point that the tips of the beams and all the points are on my necklace.

In 1970 it was a good deer.

Today, folks that were not even born when I shot that buck, would ridicule it as being too small.

I have backed up, more than I have been backed.

Having someone make a finishing shot on a wounded animal, is sometimes a neccessary evil.

What it should come down to, is, was there a chance of the animal in question getting away and being lost?

If the answer is yes, then the follow up or backing or finishing shot was definitely neccessary.

Folks need to weigh out which would bother them more, having an animal finished off by another shooter, but the trophy being recovered and the animal put out of its misery, or the wounded animal being lost and maybe taking a day or two to finally die and the trophy lost completely.

Helomech. A good guid should be able to tell about the shot placement.

I understand about not shooting at the house. I have a pair of Fox that visit my front yard every spring. I shoot a lot of predators but will not shoot these two because they are more like pets than varmints. They have started bringing their offspring around this past spring.

ch. I should have said it SHOULD NOT be an Ego thing. But you are right, it is in most cases.

My son shot his first deer at 10. He watched him for just a little over 40 minutes. All he kept telling me was that he had a shot and I would not let him shoot because of low light or I thought the angle was wrong. When he shot I dropped my binocs because I thought he would not shoot. I lost the deer and asked him where it ran. He said it dropped in it's track's, and sure enough it did. 150 class 13 point.

I agree he never got buck fever. Kid's and femals will make a man look bad with a firearm most of the time.

ch. from lurking for about 3 years I have read a lot of you're post's and agree with most all of them.

I am glad you have done so well hunting! But I will always cherish the day I shot my fist deer with my grandad.

Just a memory I will never forget, as I hope my son and daughter will never forget.

JUst becuase someone paid for a hunt...doesn't mean they get to decide what, or when, to shoot. Many places the guide tells you what is ok to shoot and what is not ok to shoot. If you shoot and wound an animal, you sure don't get to decide whether or not to shoot again! If you can't understand and agree to that, I sure hope you discuss it with a guide before going out. I don't know about everyone, but most of the big time operations, if you shoot and draw blood, you're paying for the trophy...even if it runs off.

Around the world and across the U.S., more and more operations are going to that top arrangement.

Not to P.O. anyone, but also many places are beginning to stop giving discounts to bow hunters.

Yes, bow hunters have less success than gun hunters, but when an archer sticks an arrow into an animal, that animal will die just the same as a gun shot animal will.

The "Blood Drawn = Trophy Taken" has been in place in many countries for some time now.

Operators in the U.S. are just really beginning to embrace the idea, along with the concept of the guide being prepared to back the client up, due to simple economics and publicity.

Even the high fence operations, especially those over 1000 acres in size, do not want animals shot and lossd for management reasons, but also from the standpoint of reputation, you don't want to be operating a trophy hunting business on 2500 acres or so and have animals shot and lost, especially inside a high fence. JMO.

I completely agree, if someone draws blood than it is considered a kill. I am just not a fan of guided huts. To me it is not the same as a killing my own. I would rather take a small 8 point on public land than a monster on a high fence. No offense to people that like that, I am just not one of them. The only guided hunt that I would be interested in is a stalk hunt for elk. And I would want the guide because he is familiar with the area.

I am not a big fan of guided hunts...unless I am involved...

On the places we deer hunt, guided or semi-guided, if we leave a bunch of wounded deer, we might lose the landowner's trust and the land...can't afford that, sorry if it hurts the clients feelings, hope they are mature enough to understand.

I can totally see where people would not want their shot "backed up"...just hope you see why its done that way, especially in managed leasee-guided operations...

TXCorn, I know what you mean about being ridiculed. I will never, ever, be to the point that I am hunting for antler. It's the most sought after bone, and that's all it is!! People have lost the thrill of the hunt, and what it means to not hunt to kill, but to kill to have hunted. I took my first buck bigger than a spike this year, scored barely over 100. I showed a picture to a fellow hunter friend and he told me it was small compared to his 135 on his wall. He was a trophy to me though...and I will always have that memory.

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TXCorn,

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????????? Did you mean Txcornhusker?????????

Are you trying to insult TCH or me?????

I used to do some charter fishing, and have seen the people that come. So I have no doubt about what you say about people wounding deer. But the guide should know within a few minutes of talking to the client if this will or will not be the case. We can usually tell before they even got on our boat. We have actually had to cast the rod for many clients. And we were using spinning reels the easiest to cast. We had one client that had to use a certain bait, everyone else in his party used what we had and caught their limit, and his. He caught one fish all day.

Hmmm....both I guess! Going home to go eat some ham steak!! Mmmmm!! Who'd you work for when you did your wolf research? Maybe that was txcorn...I don't know how i got so confused

I don't think TCH deserves the insult, JMO.

I worked with the Mexican Greys and the Red Wolves at the Fort Worth Zoo.

I worked as a keeper there for 24+ years, about 15 of that I worked with one or both species.

We did not do any research work, because of USF&W regs, not a lot of research was or is done on wolves.

Everything about them is well documented, except how to re-introduce them into the wild, without their intereacting with humans.

The reason dogs were developed was because wolves adapted really quickly to associating humans with a readily available source of food.

Not from depredation of humans, but due to human waste, both from the game they killed and the remnants left after skinning and cutting up the carcasses, but also the left over or waste food that was thrown out.

Wolves are highly adaptive animals, and unless they have millions of uninhabited land to roam over with NO human habitation or interference, they will not stay away from humans.

When I was on my Musk-Ox / Caribou hunt above the Arctic Circle back in 2000, I was not able to buy a wolf license since the outfitter had failed to make a note on the paperwork that I wanted a wolf license.

The last day in camp. The Inuits that made up the guide crew came tearing up to the camp reporting a wolf across the river.

Mind you, while the terrain up there is somewhat rolling, the tallest vegetation I saw was eaten down grass.

The wolf was within range across the river, but he came buy the camp able to see humans and smell us, even when we all ran out of the bunk house and was standing there talking and looking, he never sped up, never slowed down just kept trotting.

Had I have been able to buy the license, I would have been able to kill him from the camp.

As for insulting folks, That Just Ain't Right!

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But the guide should know within a few minutes of talking to the client if this will or will not be the case.

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That don't work with hunters.

A person can have lots of experience shooting targets from the bench, or killing animals from a blind watching a feeder.

Put them out on foot, taking a shot at an animal at an unknown range, and it is a different story.

I have had or seen people show up in camp, with a notebook full of all the targets they have shot over the last 6 months, and even have all the ballistics of the loads they are using on a card taped to the stock of their rifle.

Yet you run them up onto an animal at 100 yards or less and they get nervous.

Between the excitement and the adrenilin, they can make some pretty miraculous misses.

The one that always sets me off is to look around and see a client twisting the power setting on their scope.

One year on a break during clients on the javelina hunts, I took one of the guys that sometimes helps with the guiding, and had him on a nice sized javelina at less than 50 yards, and we chased that thing around for over 10 minutes, and everytime I would get the guy set up, he could not find the javelina in his scope.

The javelina finally gave us the slip and I went to asking the guy what was wrong, and it turned out, he had wanted to "Glass" something so he had his scope turned up on 12 power.

It is really hard to take a shot when all you can see is a small blur of black, and you can't tell where that blur is from on the critter.

With fishermen, I have noticed that the ones that know what they are doing, handle and carry their equipment differently than those that don't.

To me an experienced / compotent fisherman/woman, handles fishing equipment, even if it is not their own, with a comnfident, familiar attitude/method.

Folks that don't know, sort of just set and look at the rods and reels.

The quickest way to tell is to see how they hold a spinning outfit.

Reel down trying to figure out how to move the handle to the other side = experience, reel up and staring = trouble.