This poll is a little confusing for me in that I'm not exactly sure what it was asking... The Longest Range that I WOULD shoot, or the longest range that I HAVE shot a deer.
The Digital Gentleman pretty much has it right , you can HIT anything at any range you are profiecient at.
However, there are some practical limitations that I have come to understand over the years as I have aged. When younger, I dropped a deer at a little over 400 paces, probably about 300 yards from my point of shooting on the terrain I was hunting. That was with a .308 Remington BDL with open sights. A fluke for sure.. and a long story... and not the point.
What I have subsequently learned about shooting long range, is that though you may hit the deer, you may never FIND the deer.
Finding the spot that the deer was standing in when shot at long range is difficult in many circumstances, and if it doesn't drop right there.... DRT as in Dead Right There, an EMT coined phrase my son passed on to me about some of the steamy summer nights they spent in certain So. Carolina city sections, can require dusting off our tracking skills.
When a deer runs, your chances of locating it is inversely proportionate to the distance of the shot, and assuming that the your "visual imprint" of the deer's surroundings will remain static as you approach its assumed location is something we all quickly learn is a myth.
From what I have learned from some old timers, is that YOU need to direct a second party to the presumed shot location when distances stretch. If you are by yourself, the job is very difficult and next to impossible. It is easier if you are above the deer and can clearly locate an outstanding physical feature of terrain (not a treestand... a hill or mountain side) on long shots.
What IS a long shot. Most of my acquaintences seem to agree that anything over 150 yards brings brings an increasing degree of difficulty in tracking an animal that has run for most of us.
This brings us back to two fundamentals for shooting. Proficiency and observation. Proficiency is something that we can all probably intuitively agree on. Observation is something most of us are deficient in.
Close shots don't present the problems that longer range shots do. Wind direction and velocity are one. Terrain features we are shooting over is another, both for the shot and for tracking. The animals demeanor. The fact that it is standing still at the shot is not the same as is it alert, is it poised to jump, is it in an flight or fight attitude, and any number of other cues that many of us miss when we pull the trigger.
It takes only a tiny fraction of a second for a bullet to reach game, even at several hundreds of yards, yet in that same fraction, an animal can just twitch and cause shot placement to be off by several inches. Add to that the grouping you shoot, the wind and thermals, and you may end up with a dead deer walking (running) that we have to follow up on.
How far out can you kill a deer? I saw a video a few years ago on shooting running deer. As a part of that video, there was a trailer about these guys shooting at deer at long distance... like 500 to 600 yards. They had set up, set up markers and spotters, and sighted in for this distance. The gun was a 300 mag of some kind. As the video closed, they had taken a shot at a deer on this far hillside with the words "you got him!" as the deer bounded down the side... They didn't show any recovery.. so I don't know if the "got him" or just "shot him".
Aloha...
