The larger the animal the more important it becomes to pick a very precise aiming point because while big critters have big vital areas, they also have big non-vital areas. Photo by Ivan Carter.

We all know that shot placement is the most critical part in shooting at game, right? Well, depending on the circumstances, putting a bullet where it needs to go can be easier said than done. There are great references out there that show in great detail exactly where a given beast should be shot in order to reach the vitals, and today there’s really good stuff that shows an X-ray view of where those vitals lie within the body.

These materials will show, usually in bright colors, the exact spot one should aim for various angles and shot presentations. This is good stuff to study, especially if you’re going after an animal you have little or no experience hunting.

Unfortunately, out there in the field there are no bright red aiming points on game animals, and you can’t see the heart and lungs through the skin. You must pick a spot on the animal to aim at, and it must be the right spot.

Although this may seem counterintuitive, in my experience the larger the animal is the more difficult it becomes to pick that spot correctly. Vital organs remain more or less in the same scale to body size, so an elk’s heart and lungs are much larger than those of a deer.

If the vital zone you must hit is larger, it should be much simpler to hit that vital zone, right? In theory, yes. In practice maybe not because, guess what? the non-vital zone is also much larger. Generally speaking, the non-vital areas surrounding the good stuff “expand” much more than the cartridges and bullets we use.

Let me explain. A .270 Winchester, for example, is really a pretty big gun for deer-size game. Realistically, you can probably slip your shot a bit high or a wee bit back and the results will still be rapidly fatal.

We might use the same .270 to hunt elk, but it’s no longer a big gun at all. If we hit the vitals perfectly, no problem--but there isn’t much margin for error. Let’s say we choose instead a .338 Winchester Magnum. That’s a great elk cartridge, but look at it in real terms: The average bull elk is perhaps four times the size of an average whitetail buck. The .338 is not four times as powerful as a .270. By any system we have for measuring such things, it isn’t even twice as powerful.

Now let’s look at the largest game on Earth. An elephant bull is as much as 15 times larger than a bull elk. There are some monstrous cartridges that, in terms of energy, are twice as powerful as a .338, but there are no handheld cartridges that are even three times as powerful, much less 15 times.

So while larger animals do have larger vital zones, the larger the animal the more critical it becomes to precisely hit that vital zone. It sounds easy, but add excitement and inexperience, and it can be doggone difficult. Again, game animals don’t have targets superimposed over their vitals. Instead they present a uniform color or pattern (think of a leopard’s spots or a zebra’s stripes) that tends to blend in with their surroundings.

You must pick the correct spot from that mass. Now think about a bit of brush that allows you to see only windows in that mass, and then add in some shadows. Poor light makes it worse as all colors fade to black and blend in with the gathering gloom. Dark animals are perhaps the most difficult, black bears and black buffalo being good examples.