Thread: 600M GUN

There's nothing quite like a long range "hunting" thread to get the blood boiling.

And 600m isn't even long range!

Technically, 600m is medium range, according to... er... someone. NRA? http://longrangehunting.com? Nathan Foster?

Gotta love YouTube, it's created a whole new generation of long range hunters, almost overnight! Gotta love high BC long-for-calibre bullets too. You can do anything with those...

New Zealand is almost uniquely setup for longer range shooting of animals, due to the contour. Perfect valleys to shoot across. King Country, Western Ruapehu and Taranaki at the top of the list. Tumbling goats! And in some circumstances, that can be a significant plus for the farmers who otherwise might really struggle to clear goats off their back blocks, those with a boundary to the native.

But lighthearted banter aside... its a serious business.

Anyone that cannot recite their drops off by heart shouldn't even think about it.

But I will lay a polite challenge to the auto-naysayers, and say that fast kill rates are maybe a lot higher that you might think, in practiced hands, especially on smaller animals like goats, yearling deer, medium pigs. Yes of course you get the odd fail and anyone that says they don't is a liar, but that's no different to lost deer at close range in the woods. It happens.

Personally, I'm very comfortable in the 400-600m, with my setup. It's limited, and I know what those limits are. Occasionally, in perfect circumstances in terrain I know like the back of my hand, I'll go a little longer. Goats and small deer. To a large extent, its a prerequisite of the permission, there's an expectation that my efforts will return a suitable number of dead pests. It's important that I can deliver to that expectation.

If I want a decent sized meat animal that I can recover, I move to flatter contour and get a shit load closer! Simple really.

Sometimes, as hunters, the pest control type shooting muddies the waters. And a lot of that makes it onto YouTube and I think that's a problem. The standard content warning "This is a hunting video, viewer discretion advised" actually should say "This is a pest control video". The outcome is no different to the videos of terriers catching rats. Dead animals left to rot. Totally different business.

Yes of course there is an obligation to kill humanely, but in practical terms the rules of engagement are different to the purist meat hunter, who is shooting for the table. You can throw spotlighting pest deer into the mix, or WARO on private land. Necessary work. Enjoyable, if that's your thing. There's no obligation or expectation that every animal will be recovered, the last one I was involved in the recovery rate was around 70%, all for pet food.

So shooting animals at 600m, or whatever range you consider "long" and for many that's anything over 200m, is a more complex issue than it is often regarded on these kinds of threads.

If I can't get to it, and I want to recover it, I don't shoot it, no matter what the range. If I don't need to recover it, then I might shoot it, if my assessment of the variables is positive. Nothing more to it.