Should You Shoot a Deer in the Face?

Taking a frontal shot is ill-advised in most circumstances, and that's true for bow and rifle hunters. The reason is the amount of bone and fatty tissue that impede arrows from reaching vitals while also preventing a pass-through shot, and a bullet will likely enter the guts and risk spoiling meat.

What happens if you shoot a deer in the face?

With a head shot, the head is constantly moving. A quick turn or dart of the head means the bullet may hit the lower jaw. The deer runs away only to suffer an agonizing death from starvation. With the neck shot, a small miss puts the bullet into the esophagus.

Are you supposed to shoot a deer in the head?

For hunters, however, taking head shots is ill-advised. “There's simply no margin for error around a deer's relatively small brain (about 3 inches on the average deer, as much as 4 inches on a large adult buck),” NDA's Lindsay Thomas wrote for OL earlier this year in his column, Don't Aim for a Deer's Head.