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The incredible resiliency of the whitetail deer is something nearly every hunter underestimates.

"I once inspected a four-and-a-half-year-old doe that had been wounded by an arrow one fall, and shot and killed the following year in Arkansas' very tightly controlled Pine Bluff Arsenal," says Wayne, a scientists and bowhunter from Georgia. "I was doing a whitetail disease study on the area and inspecting deer shot during a special hunt that year to determine their health. The hunt manager knew a bowman the previous year had shot and 'lost' a big doe. That four-and-a-half-year-old animal, after having been severely wounded, had bred and had a fawn the following year.

"There was no doubt it was the same doe that had been 'lost' by the bowman the previous year. The deer still had six inches of arrow shaft and a broadhead embedded in it.

The arrow had penetrated from the top of the animal near the rear right leg. It went forward through the diaphragm, penetrated the chest cavity, and into the thorax. There was some inflammation around the wound, but the arrow shaft was completely encapsulated in scar tissue and the doe didn't seem to have had any ill effects from the wound whatsoever. Otherwise she should not have come into estrus, mated, and had young."

Such descriptions of animal wounds sound horribly gruesome to non-hunters. But because true archery sportsmen strive for swift, clean kills of all game, learning about the recuperative capabilities of deer is intriguing, since during the course of most hunters' careers, sooner or later they wound an animal, or one of their companions does. Under such circumstances, the discussion around the hunt camp invariably is whether or not the injured animal survived the shot.


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