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Technique · 2 October 2026

What the wounding rate actually means

Half of the animals hit with an arrow get away wounded: the figure has been going round for more than fifty years. We opened the papers it comes from and read what each one counts. What we found is no good news for anyone who wants a short answer, on either side.

Half of the animals hit with an arrow get away wounded. The 50 per cent figure is repeated by four scientific papers we have read, and two lists by animal rights organisations carry it further, as an average of 54 or 55 per cent.

We wanted to know where it comes from. We opened the papers that can be read and looked at one thing only, the one almost nobody reads: what each of them counts when it says “wounded”.

One phrase, several measurements

In the American literature on white-tailed deer, the “wounding rate” almost everywhere means an animal hit and not found by the hunter. Not a dead animal. Whether the animal that was not found died or lived is a second question, with another name (wounding loss, crippling loss), and very few studies have had the means to answer it.

And the older figures add a third measurement. Nettles, in 1976, writes that crippling loss, as the literature treats it, means deer killed but not retrieved. Another denominator, another figure.

Three different things travel under the same word. The rest of this article is about what happens when they are mixed.

The 50 per cent

The most reproduced figure comes from a 1971 paper by Downing, who followed ten years of hunting in a 746-acre enclosure at Albany, Georgia. Its abstract says: archers lost 4 of 8 deer killed, 50 per cent; hunters with buckshot, 16 of 61; those with shotgun slugs, 4 of 57.

Four deer out of eight. And the number at the bottom of the fraction is the dead animals, found by the hunter, by the tracking dog or in searches after the season, not the animals hit.

Downing knew how little that was. He writes, on page 78, that archers killed so few deer that the archery data “cannot be compared to gun data with any confidence”. To strengthen the comparison all the same, he brings in unpublished data from Radford Arsenal, in Virginia: of 138 deer killed by archers, 43 not recovered, 31 per cent. And he adds an explanation: archers there often had the chance to shoot at too great a distance to be sure of a clean kill.

The way the paper ends has to be told too, because it does not end in the bow’s favour. Downing writes that archery hunting gives its participants a great deal of high-quality recreation, but that the rate of archery loss is high, and that if a large share of the hunting pressure comes from archers, an effort to control this loss may be required. He recommends organised archery groups, which ask their members for high standards of marksmanship and responsibility, and archery hunts in dense cover, where there are fewer chances for shots at long range.

What follows is our reading, not that of any source: the most reproduced bow wounding figure in the literature rests on eight animals, and its own author declared it, in the same text, inconclusive. His conclusion about the bow remains severe all the same, and anyone who cites him honestly has to carry both.

The 22 collared deer

If the “wounding rate” counts animals not found, the natural question is: what happened to them? Only one of the studies we read followed the answer with radio transmitters, the one by Ditchkoff and his colleagues, published in 1998.

Between 1995 and 1997, on a military base in Oklahoma where hunting was allowed only with traditional bows, recurves and longbows, the researchers fitted 80 male deer with radio collars. Archers hit 22 of them. They found 11. That is the study’s 50 per cent “wounding rate”, and the authors write it as such.

Then they followed the other 11 animals, without telling the hunters where they were, so as not to influence the search. Three died: all had abdominal wounds; two died within 24 hours, the third after five to seven days. The other eight lived. The arrow had gone in near the spine or into the shoulder and left only a flesh wound.

So the same 22 deer that were hit give two figures: 50 per cent not found, 14 per cent dead and not found. The authors put both in their abstract. And their conclusion is written with care: wounding rates approaching 50 per cent are possible with the bow, but the majority of those deer survive.

Their reservations are in the text too. It is a sample of 22 hits, adult males only, with traditional bows, so not with today’s equipment. And some hunters may not have reported hitting a collared deer; if that happened, the authors write, the real wounding rate would be higher and the share of those that die would be lower.

The 60 out of 61

At the other end stands a study from South Carolina, by Morton and his colleagues, from 1995. Twenty-two experienced archers, who had killed on average 89 deer with the bow and had been hunting for 13 years, shot from elevated stands over corn feeders. A tracking dog was used whenever the deer did not fall within sight. Of 61 deer hit, 60 were found within 24 hours. The one lost was a mature buck, hit, the hunter said, in a non-vital area.

It is the finest figure in the literature, and the authors are the first to fence it in. Because of the unusual degree of control over the conditions, they write, their results may not reflect the efficiency of archery hunting in situations such as those on many public areas. What it shows, they also say, is that the bow can be highly efficient when shot selection and shooting skill are emphasised and the tracking dog is part of the rule.

In between

A fourth study, by Pedersen and his colleagues, published in 2008, covers 18 seasons, from 1989 to 2006, on a naval base in Maryland. Archers had to pass the IBEP course and an annual shooting test. In all, 104 hunters hit 908 deer and did not find 162 of them within 24 hours: 18 per cent. The definition is written plainly: not found within 24 hours, with nothing known about what came after.

Pedersen sets beside it another study, from Camp Ripley in Minnesota, which we could not read and know only through him: there, archers did not find 28 per cent of the deer they hit, but other hunters found some of them, so the net loss was 13 per cent. At Camp Ripley, Pedersen writes, there were about 29 times as many hunters per square kilometre as on his base.

What follows is our reading, not that of any source: part of the difference between the studies’ figures comes not from the weapon but from how many people are in the woods. Downing said in 1971 that a lost deer is more apt to be found by another hunter where hunters are many; Pedersen shows, with the Camp Ripley figures, how much that can matter. Each says half of the idea. The joint conclusion is ours.

What goes round

The 54 and 55 per cent figures come from lists. The Deer Options Enterprise list gathers 19 reports and arrives at a 55 per cent wounding rate and 17 shots per animal taken. The Animal Rights Coalition compilation summarises 24 studies and gives 54 per cent and 14 shots.

We could not read the papers behind these lists: most are from the 1960s, 70s and 80s, in journals and state reports that cannot be opened without a subscription or are not online. We know them only through those who cite them. And that is exactly why we noticed something: the same paper gets different figures depending on who cites it. Langenau, 1986, has 43 per cent in Ditchkoff and 61 per cent in the Deer Options Enterprise list. Gladfelter and colleagues, 1983, have 17 per cent in Ditchkoff and 49 per cent in the same list. Most likely one figure is “hit and not found” and the other is something else, but without the original texts we cannot say which is which. That is why we attribute none of them to the paper itself: we give the figure as the intermediary gives it, and name the intermediary.

Morton said in 1995 why such figures need careful reading. Most come from questionnaire surveys, and their reliability is questionable for three reasons: a long time passes between the hunt and the survey, the questionnaire says nothing about how serious the wound was, and small samples easily give high percentages with only a few deer wounded. Ditchkoff adds that, apart from two, the studies on his list do not say what kind of bow was used.

How a figure changes on its way from one report to another we wrote about separately, in “How a number travels”.

A new figure that cannot be used as it is

In 2025 the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources sent the state legislature a report on the crossbow. The Minnesota report, on page 13, gives the results of a mail survey after the 2024 season: 2 per cent of firearms hunters said they had shot and wounded a deer, against 5 per cent of all archery hunters, 4 per cent of crossbow-only hunters and 7 per cent of vertical bow-only hunters. The agency notes that hunters may under-report wounding, because it could be viewed negatively by others.

It is the only recent bow–firearm comparison by a state agency that we have read. And it is easy to misuse.

What follows is our reading, not that of any source: the percentages are of hunters who report a wounded animal over the whole season, not of animals wounded among those hit. The report does not say how many shots each hunter took. No per-animal rate can be calculated from these figures, and anyone who writes that “the bow wounds three and a half times as often as the gun” is making up a figure the report does not contain.

And in Europe

The two European series we have read do not use the same measure either.

Denmark calculated, for its large deer, wounding of 8–9 per cent, defined as animals hit that are not found; we wrote about it in “What Denmark measured, and what it did not”, including the fact that the Danish reports have no rifle wounding figure to compare it with.

Finland has the Finnish interim report of the bowhunters’ association, from August 2021: 70 white-tailed deer hunted with the bow, of which 3 wounded, 4.29 per cent. But the report nowhere says what “wounded” means, 60 of the 70 were fawns, and the data were collected by the hunters, not by observers. It is an association report, not a peer-reviewed paper; we did not find the final analysis published.

What follows is our reading, not that of any source: the American “wounding rate”, the Danish wounding, the undefined Finnish wounding and the wounding in the British rifle study by Aebischer and colleagues, from 2014, which measures whether the animal hit is killed outright, cannot go into the same table unless every row carries its definition. None of the sources makes this comparison. We do not make it here either.

What remains

What remains is that the 50 per cent figure exists, but does not mean what it is said to mean: in the study that followed the animals, half the deer hit were not found, and three quarters of those lived. What remains is that the studies with very high recovery were done in conditions their own authors call unusual. What remains is that Downing, where it all starts, wrote that archery loss is high and that, where archers are many, an effort to control it may be needed. And what remains is that Downing and Morton, from the two ends of the literature, speak about the same things: Downing, about shots at too great a distance, where wounding becomes likely; Morton, about careful shot selection, skill and the tracking dog, as the reasons for his near-complete recovery.

A short answer we do not have. What we have instead is a rule for reading: before any percentage, ask what it counts.

To check further

Sources:

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