Thanks for your replies and your efforts to be ethical hunters and promote such. I am sixty years old and shot my first buck with a single shot twenty gauge with buckshot when I was 12. Since then have taken one or more with buckshot every year since. When hunting with hounds in the south most of the time the cover is too thin the visibilty to short and the terrain too flat to be able to use a rifle or slug from a ground position. The area we hunt in restricts us to shotgun only. We restrict the slug guns to elevated positions because of their ability to travel through a hundred yards of palmetos or more. Your right spray and pray is unethical and doesn,t work. I have purchased many shotguns through the years trying to get better patterns and with each one I have bought almost every practial shot combo to test as have the rest of my friends in our hunt club. We often laugh about one of my guns that I spent more money on buckshot testing than I did on the gun looking for a acceptial pattern, no luck I might add . The gun was subsequently donated to a fund raising raffle. I have paid my dues buying and testing shotguns and ammo for over fourty years. All I was asking for was for someone to share their test results of their new benelli and save me a lot of time and money. Also I would like to say that because of good hounds and good hunters we recover almost all the deer that that are hit. The right gun and load combo is paramount to this end as well as a experianced hunter that has patterned his gun and tested the effective range for his or her combo. My question was in line with my never ending quest for even better results. I might also add that I also hunt with bow muzzleloader and rifle here in the south and on several yearly hunts out of state. Dont be too quick to judge the dog hunters. they on a whole put more efforts into their hunting than do the still hunters that go a few times a year. Every year we recover deer that were poorly shot by bow hunters and muzzloaders. Because of the wet and poor tracking conditions most of these would be lost if it were not for the efforts of the dog hunters. Lets remember that at the core we are all hunters and we have more than enough people trying to stop all of us. United we stand or divided we fall its our choice. God bless all of you and have a wonderful holiday season. Safe hunting and my a big buck come your way thanks Ken
