I'll share this here. Upcoming editor's opinion column I wrote for a summer issue of the magazine I write for:
Why You Shouldn’t Shoot Past 20 Yards in 2024
As a kid, I read articles like this one all the time. The “speed kills” trend was just beginning, and fast bows, light arrows, and mechanicals were all the Rage®. But a lot of the Old Guard were adamant that conventional wisdom still held. Bowhunting was a close-range game, and goobers who shot at deer past traditional distances with their laser rangefinders and adjustable sights were at best misled by snazzy advertising.
They were, and still are, mostly correct.
Let’s do some light number crunching. With the current trend back towards heavier hunting arrows in the 500-600 grain range, most bows are clocking around 75-80% of their advertised IBO speeds. That means that even if you’re shooting a “hot” 350 fps bow, your real world speed is around 270-280 fps. Many hunters with shorter and lighter draw lengths and weights are shooting less.
Sound travels at around 1,100 fps. The reaction speed of a deer has been clocked at around 1/10th of a second. A deer in get-out-of-dodge mode can move between 8 fps (in a free fall) and 50 fps (assuming it’s using muscle tension to twist or leap).
With those figures, let’s see what happens with a 25 yard shot.
At 280 fps, an arrow will arrive at a deer in 0.26 seconds. The sound of the shot, by comparison, reaches the deer in 0.06 seconds, or when the arrow has traveled roughly 17 feet. The deer has 0.2 seconds left to react and move now. Reaction speed takes 0.1 second. At this point, the arrow is still 30 feet from the deer, and the ball is firmly in its court.
The deer may not move at all, in which case the arrow will probably find its mark. But if it relaxes its front legs and drops its chest to gather energy for its first burst of speed, your arrow will land 9 inches high. As shocking as that may sound, if you’ve shot at enough deer, you’ve had an unexplained miss or bad hit. There’s your excuse.
Arrows will never be supersonic bullets coming out of centerfire rifles, and hunters will always have to account for a deer’s reaction speed. You can definitely make shots beyond 20 yards, and I have. But when you pull the trigger on your bow release on a longer shot, there is a shocking amount of time where things are out of your hands and in the deer’s.
“So what?” you may say. “You miss all of the shots you don’t take!” True, but the problem is that not all misses are clean. Poor shots don’t just translate to suffering for the deer, but inconvenience for you. A smelly, gut-shot deer waiting for me after a long, late night trailing session is not my idea of a fun weekend.
Remember, the closer you keep your shots this season, the less you’re leaving the outcome of the shot up to the deer.
Feel free to check my math, but it matches up fairly well with other breakdowns I've read. I based the 280fps feed based on forum member feedback on a recent thread I created.
