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penetrating injury
Posted by deglen on Mar 20 2006
The manner of death from firearms in non-CNS shots is anoxia (of the brain). Period. This has nothing to do with how much energy is put into the animal. The same amount of energy coming out of the end of the barrel is expended in recoil of the weight of the gun against your shoulder. It doesn't kill the hunter and it isn't going to kill the animal either.
Anoxia to the brain is no oxygen content in blood which reaches the brain. There are two main factors at work - the amount of blood going to the brain and the oxygen concentration in that blood. The advantage of a penetrating shot through the chest cavity (i.e. lungs) is that there is now a hole into which outside air can enter the pleural space. If there is enough outside air which enters this space (remember the diaphragm of the lungs makes the space for the lungs bigger by this negative pressure and that's what causes outside air to enter lungs) the negative pressure which keeps lungs inflated will be equilibrated with the outside aire and the lungs will collapse. Effective air exchange is then lost, whether the heart is still pumping blood around or not; eventually there will be severe enough hypoxia (low concentration of oxygen in the blood) that the brain will suffer and the animal will lose consciousness, then die shortly after if the process continues unabated which it should if you've produced a through and through injury. Two wounds are better than twice as good because the exit wound is typically much larger and thus has less of a chance of clotting over quickly which would seal the hole. Also if you put both lungs down, there is NO lung available for oxygen exchange, quite a big difference than having one or some functioning lung left. I know people {I'm a pathologist} can survive one lung down (if there is no concomitant shift of the great vessels or heart, which compromises blood return to the heart), and I imagine animals can too. Otherwise a non-penetrating shot to the chest (that is one in which the lungs do not collapse) will still have some advantage over a body shot because the lungs will bleed significantly resulting in two deleterious effects. One, the lung tissue which is now deprived of normal blood flow will not be available for oxygen exchange and two, the hemorrhage itself will take up space which will reduce the volume of normal functioning lung available for air exchange, so it's still a better shot than say through the gut or flank. The hemorrhage from lung tissue preferentially takes up the volume over normal lung because the damaged arteries are still supplying blood at a higher (pulmonary artery and bronchial artery) pressure than the average surrounding lung tissue, so until the pressures equalize ( which is theoretically possible because the pleural space is still intact) the blood from the wound will crowd out the normal lung tissue. A gut shot may be better than a strictly muscle shot because there are more large vessels per volume of tissue and the surrounding tissue pressure is lower and there is more capacity for blood to escape from the vascular compartment. This of course means the animal dies a slower death (if clotting doesn't occur before they enter irreversible shock).
It's about shot placement and what the bullet hits, not energy.
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