If they are being honest, most veteran deer hunters will admit to having taken a shot at a full-out running deer.

As a young deer hunter, I took my share of low percentage shots. A couple of deer in bounding flight did fall to my snap shots.
Looking back, however, I feel no particular soul-satisfying sense of pride in those kills. It was luck, not skill as an outdoorsman or as a marksman. Without doubt, a few deer wound up wounded in my haste to put meat on the table at the expense of good sportsmanship.

What about you? As a deer hunter, where do you fall in the running-shot debate? Some of you will dismiss out-of-hand my view that low-percentage running shots at deer are impractical and push the margins of fair chase.

Legendary trophy buck hunters, the Benoits, have made the running shot almost a deer-hunting standard in their deer hunting videos. And they would have the right to cross examine my case by asking, “Well, how many trophy bucks have you bagged in your 50 years in the deer woods?”

“None,” I would respond.

Then, smugly, they could reply, “We rest our case!”

Another well-known tropy whitetail hunter, R.G. Bernier, in his book, The Deer Trackers, never really delves into the fair-chase implications of the running shot. In one of his chapters, Tools of the Trade, he does explain that his choice of sight on his Remington 30-06 pump is a William’s peep sight equipped with a twilight aperture.

He writes,” I have always shot with a screw in aperture and it has never prevented me from being able to locate running game.”
So it follows then, that Bernier, like the Benoits, has no misgivings about taking the running shot. Putting yourself in their shoes, or boots, it would be difficult to resist a running shot at a fleeing trophy buck, especially if you had been on the track all day and darkness was coming on.

T.S. Van Dyke, who was an American hunter/naturalist on a par with conservationist Aldo Leopold and wrote the classic, blue-chip deer book, The Still-Hunter, didn’t have much use for the running shot. He writes, “Bang! bang! bang! goes your rifle again, and still the brown goes on. Stop. Save your cartridges. He is wounded, and if you empty your rifle-magazine he may get out of this ravine before you can load again. It is evident that you are now too excited to hit anything; and therefore you had better take a few moments’ time to cool down. And in the meanwhile fill up the magazine of your rifle, for you may need all the shots it will hold.”

Of course, each and every deer encounter, by a deer hunter, is unique with its own set of circumstances and split-second decision making. There are running shots, and then there are running shots. A so-called “Texas heart shot,” taken at the rear end of an exiting deer, is just plain wrong and unethical, period. On the other hand, a deer at 30 yards moving at a fast walk sideways through open hardwoods may present a decent target if the hunter can pull ahead, hold on an opening, and wait for fur in the scope.

As hunting ethicist Jim Posewitze writes, “The most important measure of hunting success is how you feel about yourself.” This is where ethics and the ethical hunt comes in. It is said that ethics is how you behave alone in the field. It is what you do, or don’t do, when no one is watching. It is between you and your conscience.

Van Dyke, who was a frontier judge when he wasn’t deer hunting or writing about it, expresses a belief in The Still-Hunter that is no less relevant today to whitetail hunters than it was in 1923: “Yet somehow you feel a supreme contempt for the exploit of your friend who last year sat by a saltlick and bagged two in one night with a shotgun. You feel rich in a far higher and nobler experience, and feel that to him who has within the true sprit of the chase there is far more pleasure in seeing over a ridge or among the darkening tree trunks a flaunting flag wave a mocking farewell to hope than in contemplating a gross pile of meat bagged with less skill than is required to wring a chicken’s neck on a moonlight night.”

V. Paul Reynolds is editor of the Northwoods Sporting Journal. He is also a Maine Guide, author of a new book, The Maine Deer Hunter’s Logbook and co-host of a weekly radio program “Maine Outdoors” heard Sundays at 7 p.m. on The Voice of Maine News-Talk Network (WVOM-FM 103.9, WQVM 101.3) and former information officer for the Maine Dept. of Fish and Wildlife. His e-mail address is [email protected].