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Anonymous
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Most of our big game animals are quadruped grass eaters. This means that those beasts we seek as game animals usually offer us broadside targets, since they tend to present themselves to a pursuer at approximate right angles. When so accepting a broadside target, we find that the vital zone of such a target is presented in the lower third of the target's thorax. This means that the kill zone of our target is usually located lower than the median line of the thorax. Consider then that when we are shooting at a quadruped grass eater, we must remember to keep our shots low. Furthermore we must remember that at any predictable distance, we are not shooting at a point but rather at a roughly circular pattern. Witness your target group. When engaging our target, we must place a theoretically circular pattern on the animal's broadside, and this in turn means that if we miss we will probably miss high, since half of our group size is going to be located above its centerline. To take this further, we discover that when engaging a game animal, our misses will tend to be high - assuming that we are pretty good shots. Most misses in the field, therefore, will be high misses, since we subconsciously tend to "help the bullet." Since our misses on game animals tend to be high, we must remember to avoid "helping the bullet" and seek to keep our pattern low on the target. -- Jeff Cooper
