Are You Getting Bad Blood Trails with the 6.5 Creedmoor? This Is Why
BY Herschel Smith
29 minutes ago
For years now we’ve heard from rifle and ammo manufacturers that the 6.5 Creedmoor is their most popular cartridge. It’s an excellent round for open country, and it’s found its way into plenty of Midwestern and Eastern deer camps, too. But there’s one consideration that’s become a head scratcher. A whole bunch of deer hunters are reporting sub-par blood trails — even on well-hit deer — shot with their 6.5 Creeds.
Just ask full-time Wisconsin blood-tracker Dean Muthig. When I spoke with Muthig a few years back, he had put his Bavarian mountain scent hounds on 230 deer tracks so far that season. Many of his calls over the years have been from parents who need help recovering deer during the youth rifle season. Not because their kids are making poor shots, though. Muthig says younger hunters seem to shoot just as accurately as adults. Instead, it’s because they tend to use smaller calibers like a .243 — and the 6.5 Creedmoor. In other words, it’s not that these kids aren’t killing deer. They just can’t find them.
Consider the 9-year-old boy who shot a nice buck on a Wisconsin food plot. The 8-pointer fled into a stand of pines, which his family searched without finding a speck of blood. When Muthig arrived, his hound lead him directly to the buck. It had run 175 yards before piling up from the double-lung shot. The bullet had not exited, and there was no visible blood on the entire track.
Stop saying that a lung shot is a good shot on deer. It’s not. If you want to put the deer down in a immediate, ethical shot, aim for a high shoulder shot.
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