This should always be our objective, but how do cartridges do it? What separates a good cartridge from a bad one?

The cleanest, quickest death possible in pigeon shooting is always achieved by rupturing one of the major blood vessels or vital organs. This leads to a sudden and fatal drop in blood pressure – death is instantaneous. To achieve this, pellets must damage either the blood vessels in the brain, the neck, or in and around the heart/lung area. Pigeons are difficult to kill because all of these areas are quite small. If you put both your thumbs together and imagine another thumb, top joint, in the middle the top joints are roughly the size of the heart/lung area. Imagine a thumbnail a few cms above that and you have a rough idea of the size of the vital areas you need to hit to kill cleanly – 35 meters away – doing 45mph. No one said this was  easy.

A pigeon directly over head also gets considerable protection of those areas from their large chest muscles (the tasty bits). If they have been feeding on sugarbeet tops in the winter, a full crop can protect the major vessels in the neck like armour plating. That’s why some guns go up shot sizes and weights for this type of pigeon shooting. There are very few ‘bad’ cartridges these days, but some may pattern better in your gun / choke combination than others.  Follow this link for an explanation on the relationship between shot size, pattern, and penetration.

If you are shooting pigeon with an air rifle the cleanest kill is shooting through the back between the wings – a direct line to the vital organs and vessels. Through the back there is no thick wing muscle, and no breast bone to hinder the path of the pellet. Death again is instantaneous.

All these points matter because we are not, as ethical sportsman, into wounding. We need to reduce the possibility of wounding as far as we are able. But there is a trade off here: we need to reduce wounding but without spoiling the bird for the table by hitting it with too many pellets as a result of either too tight a choke, too heavy a load in the cartridge, or too close a range. Also we need to factor in our own skill with a shotgun. Also we have to consider our skills as decoyers to get the birds to come into our range consistently. This matters as we are sometimes in action decoying for an extended period of time and we have to try to maintain a high level of proficiency.

As well as the moral imperative to ensure a humane death for our quarry, there is also an element of self interest. Wounded birds release stress hormones into their blood stream, and therefore their muscles, as they expire. Adrenaline and cortisol are pumped through the system and this reduces the quality of the meat. So if we are looking to get the best possible meal out of our efforts then we should be good at what we do with a shotgun.

There are few ‘right’ answers here, but there are right intentions, and when we reach that happy place of a gun / cartridge / choke combination that suits our ability, we can be confident we can kill our quarry first time, and get it on the table in the best condition possible.