Tough Animals

[Ben Long]

Nature is cruel but by gosh animals can be tough. Yesterday, my wife pointed out a whitetail buck in our yard. The right hind leg was broken at the hock. By "broken" I mean gone. The hoof and dewclaws were dangling like a Christmas ornament by 6 inches of tendon. Gruesome! But the buck was just limping along, feeding, as casual as you or me at the supermarket. I have a hard time imagining what would cause such a brutal wound. What are some injuries you've seen wild animals endure?

 

[JTHOMP]

Killed this pig a couple years ago. Someone had caught him before. Cut his ears but didn't bar him then turned him loose. Not sure how long it was before I killed him, but after talking with the landowner the pig had been shot on two separate occasions. Once with a 300 and later with a 270 on the neighbor's place.

He was rooting up a field when we were coming off the river after a float trip and I luckily had my shotgun in the truck. Didn't even realize the wounds until I rolled him over and saw the gaping hole the size of my fist full of maggots and flies.

 

[BuzzH]

My Dad shot a deer several years ago that was missing an entire front leg. Surprising he made it with the number of lions in the area. I don't know if it was born that way or what, the bone under the skin looked pretty clean, tough to tell.

A friend of mine has called in a coyote with a leghold trap on its leg, and he said he didn't even know it until he walked over to skin it. He also called in and killed a coyote that had a snare around the side of the neck and one leg in it as well. Same thing, it ran into the call like it had nothing wrong with it. The coyote chewed through the snare when the lock hung up in the hair.

One time, while hunting with the same guy that shot those two, I busted the hind leg on a running coyote and it rolled into the bottom of a draw. I heard a bunch of bone crunching and went down to find where the coyote chewed the broken leg off. I told my buddy I would track it down...his response, "a coyote on 3 legs is about a half a mile an hour slower than one on 4"...he was right. Last time I saw that coyote is was running along real well about a mile out in a big flat.

Another friend shot a 6 point bull elk running through heavy timber and it was missing a hind leg between the ham and the hock, also couldn't tell if was a birth defect or what.

You're right, animals are amazingly tough and resilient, worthy of much respect.

 

[Exhausted]

I killed a hog with my bow a few years back. There was no damage on the outside from what I could and never noticed anything during the cleaning or butchering. However, after smoking the ribs, my wife and I both found fragments of copper in separate sections of the meat, near the rib bones. No idea on the caliber or anything, but it certainly surprised me. There was zero internal damage when I was cleaning it. I've wondered if someone took a shot at it with a pistol and the shield slowed the bullet down enough and it just broke apart and never got passed the ribs.

 

[Topgun 30-06]

Worst thing I've ever seen was a whitetail doe at Fort Custer, MI back in the 60s when my Dad was GW out there while he was still a Civil servant for 6th Army Corp. He was out on patrol and I was in another jeep on what we called deer patrol because I wasn't old enough to be a GW with full enforcement powers, so I carried a radio if I needed help. Anyway, in November a full month after the short archery season in early October an adult doe wobbled across the road in front of Dad's jeep and he immediately knew something was drastically wrong, jumped out and killed her with the .30 carbine he was issued for his duties. He called me and when I got over to help him load her into the jeep she had a broadhead point sticking out the side of her left eye orbit and the shaft was broken off behind her right ear. She may not have survived the winter, but her stomach was full when we gutted her and she was as fat as if she wasn't wounded.

 

[utahminer]

I once shot a mule deer that had lost a portion of his lower leg (imagine about 3 inches above the ankle) and was just limping around on a bare leg bone. I have no idea how long it had been like that but the lower part of the bone was hallow and looked horrible.

 

[dcopas78]

My dad, who is a taxidermist, was caping a deer for a customer. He was almost finished, and was skinning the last part of the nose when he was stuck by something about halfway between the nostrils and the corner of the eye. At first he thought it was a thorn since thorns are always embedded in the hides. He was looking for the thorn when he noticed a small black tip sticking out of the side of the deers face. It turns out, that the deer had been hit in the head with a arrow, under the lower right ear base, the arrow passed under the brain cavity, with the tip of the broad head ( a thunderhead and the black "thorn" that got him)barely protruding out of the side of the deers nose. There were no obvious scars other than a callused area on the entry wound, with the arrow broken off flush just underneath the scar. The deer was 100% healthy with an arrow in his sinus cavity.

 

[Hunting Wife]

Oh man, I’ve seen all kinds of things, mostly while working back in my wildlife health days. A few memorable ones:

- Lots of 3-legged elk which, given the area and the number of other animals with apparently healed bullet wounds, we could only assume were the results of gunshots.

- A bull elk with something protruding from his face just below his eye. On necropsy, we found a 6 inch long broken off antler tine penetrating the sinus.

- while doing some bison fieldwork, we had a cow get gored right in the stomach by a pissed off bull. Blood was pouring out of a baseball-sized hole in the paunch like someone was tipping a 5-gallon bucket. We cut her loose so she didn’t die in the chute, and assumed she would be one of our herd health necropsy candidates the next day. Went out to look for her a little later, and she was feeding around like nothing happened. Went back the next morning and she was still looking pretty unphased. She survived and didn’t seem any worse for wear.

-another bison that had some sort of run in and had what looked like a broken horn sheath. Once she was in the chute, we could see that not only was the horn sheath broken, but she had actually fractured the skull and you could see the meninges through a crack in her skull. Gave her a shot of antibiotics and cut her loose too. She also went on to have no apparent ill effects.

It’s pretty remarkable how tough they are.

 

[dirtclod Az.]

Shot a Javelina on time and decided on a Euro mount.Boiled out the skull
and found a .22 round stuck in his jaw and multiple shotgun pellets imbedded in his skull.
all old wounds with bone growing over the led.Also had a severely torn upper lip had
had also healed.Really old Boar,his skull is right next to me on the book case as I type this.
Too bad I cant seem to send pics.

 

[Doublecluck]

My buddy shot a big 6x7 bull thru and thru just below the backstrap with his bow last season. After 30 hours of searching we found him on the adjacent private land mounting a cow.. blood spots on the fur on both sides. Right up on her like nothing happened..

 

[Walkathon]

Skinned a whitetail deer once and found a .223 bullet in the hind quarter. That whole quarter was infected and stunk really bad. Had to discard it. My friend killed the deer opening weekend of rifle season and I'm guessing someone shot the deer a couple of weeks earlier with the .223

 

[LuketheDog]

We have a doe hopping around the neighborhood lately with an injured back leg, she can't seem to use it or put any weight on it at all. She can still hop a 4' fence with no issues though...

 

[Northwoods Labs]

Growing up we had a deer limping around with an injured back leg that frequented the woods behind our house. I remember that we always called her "gimpy." She lived for years like this.

 

[FAIR CHASE]

Few years back my buddy shot an antelope with a longbow a little high. We tracked it a long ways before it got dark and saw it once a couple days later and looked like it might survive.

 

[Letthemgrow]

A few over the years:
-A bull elk femur that had been shattered, I assume by a bullet, and then grew a bone arch between the two pieces.
-Jumped a warthog out of a hole and shot him lengthways. When we went to pick him up he had a 5-6" deep gash behind one shoulder that was absolutely riddled with the biggest maggots I have ever seen. (the landowner cut out around the wound and sold the carcass for biltong.)
-A rutting whitetail buck that showed no sign of any injury. When we got up to him he had green puss running out both sides of his neck. Someone had shot him at some point and apparently didn't hit anything to vital because he had his head down trailing a dow when we spotted him.

 

[Bullshot]

I've seen a whitetail doe with a car-shattered lower hind leg left dangling by tendons and fur. She happily hobbled around all winter, and by spring was back and followed by two new fawns. I have taken a healthy deer a with broken arrow and broadhead lodged in the chest cavity and healed over, one with buckshot pellets healed over, another that was shot in the head and body with birdshot, all healed over. I've also seen and killed a few deer with gangrenous wounds that may or may not have gotten better with time but in most cases, the deer act normally despite it.

 

[kansasdad]

My 100 yard shot put my biggest whitetail buck down almost instantly. Walking up to him, nothing seemed amiss. My entry hole was exactly where I had aimed, and I turned him over to check the other side where I expected to see an exit wound, and found the high shoulder enlargement about the size of a large grapefruit. I thought I would find my bullet just under the hide, and the fluctuant (water balloon consistency) mass would be heart/lung blood.

Dragging him across the creek bottom over to where I had pulled my hunting scuzzmobile van, I was able to get him in whole so that I could process him at home. Once I started that process, I was surprised to find a muzzy broadhead with 4 inches of arrow attached just inside his thoracic cavity. There may have been some high lung damage, but obviously not enough to have been quickly lethal. The bump that I had supposed to be the near exit site was instead a large collection of pus, which seemed to be nearly walled off from the rest of the body. I found my bullet exit site in the ideal broadside top of the heart.

I figured that if I was Pa Engels, living totally off the land, I would have eaten nearly every morsel of this wounded and infected deer. Since I am not Pa Engels, I decided to not consume any of this deer, just to be on the safe side of safe.

 

[Mallardsx2]

I know a guy that finished off a deer that got hit by a car one time. It had a broken back. So they shot it right in the had with a .22 magnum. Killed it dead or so they thought.....

They drug it 25 yards to the road to load it up to give it to the guys uncle for the meat. Went to pick it up to load it into the truck and the deer jumped straight to its feet in between the three guys.

One of them karate kicked the deer in the ribs to knock it to the ground and got another got a second bullet in its head.

Animals are tough.

 

[midwesthunter]

I had shot a whitetail buck several years ago, that had a broad head with about 6" of arrow lodged in the back straps, and a led slug, best guess was 20ga in the shoulder from previous season.

 

[Big Sky]

Some interesting stories. I have a side business using beetles to clean skulls. I've seen thousands of skulls over the years and all kinds of injuries, but this one is the most unique. I took photos otherwise I figured nobody would believe it. At some point in his life this coyote had been shot through the top of the head and the bone had started to heal back over. The blue arrow shows the bullet entry and the red the exit hole. If you look close you can see how the top of the skull fractured but was healing back together.

The photo below is a close up of the exit hole. I can't believe this coyote not only survived being head shot, but lived long enough for the bones to start to fuse back together. The client that shot it, actually called it in with a predator call and shot it in the chest. He said from the outside the coyote looked perfectly healthy. I actually offered to buy the skull from him, because it's so unique but he wouldn't sell it. I can say I blame him.