Long Range Hunting

Hits and Misses and Having Fun

Shooting big game animals at long range has become very fashionable. Rifles and ammunition are being built just for that purpose, and courses are developed to teach hunters how to do it. The sporting press offers articles about it and writers and editors argue on how to treat the topic and where to draw the distance line. I’ve done some long range hunting successfully and unsuccessfully, and I do not think it a very practical or satisfying way to hunt. I’ll get to my thoughts on that in a minute, but first, if we’re going to discuss “long range,” we need to define what it is.

The definition I use – regardless of whether I’m shooting at a steel plate or a deer – is any range where I must make some sort of aiming correction to place the bullet in the right spot. Given a 8-inch kill zone or 8-inch steel plate, that would be the distance beyond where you could zero your rifle so the bullet would never rise or fall more than 3 inches above or below your line of sight. With most modern big game cartridges that’s somewhere between about 250 and 350 yards. Thanks to the consistency of gravity, this maximum practical range is a very easy distance to calculate. It’s how far your bullet – no matter the cartridge you’re shooting – will travel in one-third of a second. In most cases, if a big game animal is more than a third of a second away, the shot is too far and I need to do some more hunting/stalking.

Now I know some talented folks that can shoot at 600 yards just as well as I shoot at 300 yards. I would not let Caylen Wojcik with the Modern Day Sniper shoot at my hat from 600 yards. And while I used to think that “long range” would be a different distance for those shooters than it would for me, I don’t feel that way anymore. This is partly because no matter how well you shoot, you cannot alter ballistics, and partly because no matter your shooting skill, as the distances increase so does the effect of every variable associated with getting a good hit.

A recent example of this is a situation that unfolded on social media where an outdoor writer and another hunter found themselves at odds over a mule deer buck. I was not there and have no more information than was available on social media. But it seems clear that mistakes were made and one of the first was shots taken at long range. Experience has shown that when that happens a lot of shit can go wrong.