water buffulo with a selfbow and stone points, now with testing results

[knife river]

Chrisg, the only "experiment" being considered right now is to shoot stone-tipped arrows in a freshly killed animal.  If any one is foolish enough to try it without proper preparation beforehand, then they fully deserve the Darwin award.

Don't pull your post.  Not only is it a riveting read, but offers top-drawer advice.  It makes me wonder, though, if you're saying that hunters should ever hunt cape or water buffalo with bows?

[tradtusker]

Woody it wont be long till i get back and hunt Buff in Ozz again and giraffe in South Africa I would be very interested on Testing Stone tips on Dead big game animals to see how they perform, i think there is a lot to be lurnt and would be interested as you said to see the results of a Properly made stone head, its limitations and it capability's.

there is no problem shooting Buff with archery gear both modern or trad but like Rick said it has to be done properly advise from the right people has to be taken, the right gear must be used, there is also a different mind-set you take on when hunting big/dangerous game.

[ozy clint]

i agree andy

[knife river]

Andy, that sounds like a plan.    

[chrisg]

Hi Woody, thank you for your kind words. I am aware the debate has moved on and is focussed on testing on a dead animal. I think this is a good idea. I wonder though if it is shown that stone is not good for heavily boned animals that people will stop there?  Careful, controlled testing is needed to prove the effectiveness or otherwise of stone points on heavy boned game. Ashby has spent many years doing this with steel points and his findings in 'perfect laboratory conditions', balanced against field tests illustrate very well the vagaries and risk of 'going out and giving it a try to see if it can be done' BY SHOOTING A LIVE ANIMAL. I am offended by the gung ho attitude that this thread started with, it is not a thrilling ride at the funfair. This kind of hunting is the most serious kind and the animals, our fellow hunters and the world needs us to behave responsibly. Rick has added considerable evidence to show that this might be more than just a stupid stunt but that it could hurt other people. An idea originally mooted by Don Thomas. I would be inclined to listen to that coming from those people. As professional guides we had to contend with many grumpy animals after the short hunting season in that reserve, my accident was not caused by a wounded animal from human actions nevertheless it serves to show that any large animal that is injured is dangerous. I have guided for many years and this was a freak incident, I was lucky is all.

I am not saying that we should not hunt them, but I am saying that it has to be done well and for the right reasons. There is a world of difference hunting animals in the bush where they are not standing square and level, where there may be other unseen ones, where one or more might be injured, in Africa you might have lion or elephant in the vicinity, etc etc. This is why we do want to hunt them. However I have read many stories on this site and in magazines that end, "after tracking for an hour or three ' the blood trail dried up, got lost, etc, so we had to leave the animal and went back to camp'" NONONONO, if you could choose to shoot it you had better be prepared to find it. Especially if it is a dangerous game animal like a buff. It has been shown that bowhunting these big animals is possible, done right. I would like to  see conclusive evidence that stone points can stand hitting ribs, and yes they do overlap considerably in the middle and they go far back.This is not  conjecture, or open to debate, only down low near the front is there any marginal gap, but a stone point hitting a rib even obliquely is going to have to be tough, ie flexible-not many stones have that-not to snap. In TBM there was a story of a guy shooting chert birdpoints into a whitetail doe and almost all his points broke from passing through ribs or hitting the shoulder blade. A buff is not a whitetail.Those ribs are hard.We are talking of a perfect shot, Ashby has gone to great lengths to find a point that will up your odds of success with marginal hits, so far only the best steel points seem to make it.
chrisg
chrisg

[Rick McGowan]

chrisg, has said it very very well and I hope he dosn't pull any of his posts. Ashby, did considerable testing on water buffalo after he got to Australia and found that they are second only to the pachyderms in difficulty of penetration.

[ozy clint]

"do you think it could be done?" is the 1st sentence of this thread. sorry if you think that is gung ho. i've never said that it would be attempted without 1st seeing whether it was possible.

[knife river]

Excellent post, chrisg.  I agree with everything you wrote.  After exchanging several pm's with ozy clint, I am confident we're all on the same page.

I didn't see the TBM article you mentioned (I only subscribed for one year).  I'd like to know a few things, like what kind of stone he used, if it was heat treated, the quality of the knapping, and how it was hafted.  Each one of those factors can determine success or failure.  All stone points are not created equal:  I've seen pics of many deer hunting set-ups that I thought to be marginal for even foam targets...  

I'm not trying to defend (or condemn) stone points:  as I said in my first post on this thread, I have serious reservations about their effectiveness on water buffalo.  I'm very curious, though, to  see what happens in a test on a freshly-killed buff.

[chrisg]

Fair response, Clint. Rereading it all again on balance most posts are based in reason and gladly the initial plan of testing on downed game is back at the top of the page. If Ashby after so many years has narrowed down material design and dynamics to a very limited set of parameters with STEEL, stone points have a long way to go yet.

Clint, your line 'maybe this is the last 'feat' with primitive equipment' was the one to alarm me. Perhaps it was not meant in the way I took it. That and a few others asking that it be filmed at least, what is this? On Tradgang?  Enough preaching.

Maybe the tests on downed big game will draw a line that defines a real limit. This is not about 'failure' rather it is like saying "don't jump from the third floor balcony", we know you will get hurt!

Woody, that article might be in Primitive Archer.  I will dig it out. He did use several different types of stone and they looked very well made, yet I was struck that he said most broke, he had lots of pictures, and he used a low poundage bow, about 40# I think. You have brought our attention to the hafting and shaft thickness a few times and I know Ashby has lots to say on that score too.
This is the first time I have discussed my accident publicly after eleven years, apart from addressing the guides and scouts at the Pilanesberg. The accident was in Klaserie. No reason not to talk about it, just a private thing. The circumstances are important here, not me. This thread just set alarm bells ringing. I do not want to hijack the thread and thanks to  guys who pm'd me. It is an interesting debate and folks can learn from all inputs.
chrisg

[tradtusker]

Chris as from Clint's stand point i never got the impression he was going to grab a stone point and gung ho one into a Living Buff.

oftern on Forums like this things dont always come across as intended by the poster.

without getting off track from the original post.
do you think it could be done?

 sure i think it is possible,once off maybe, however with any consistency im very doubtful as you are. I do not believe the stone point could withstand a full on rib hit without breaking. And there are hundreds of variables.

Woody how about the consistency between stones of the same material, im presuming one may be harder than another? can there be undetected faults? what in your opinion would be the best stone material?  

as Chris pointed out look and the extent of Ashby's finding and see how many good steel broadheads failed.

 "Maybe the tests on downed big game will draw a line that defines a real limit. This is not about 'failure' rather it is like saying "don't jump from the third floor balcony", we know you will get hurt!"  i think that is a good line

now what we have to do is get some of woodys points into a dead buff

or we'r going to wear ourselves out beating this horse

woody ill give Ed Ashby a shout and try get his take on this and info on the best way to go about testing.

[Rick McGowan]

clint, I don't think anyone is taking you to task, it was some of the other "go for it" posts that started getting a bit over enthusiastic(see page three). All my answers are either in response to your original question,"do you think it can be done" and in my experience, no it can't, not on any kind of a reliable basis. I am sure that if you do it enough times on live buffalo, something will die, possibly the buffalo. My earlier analogy about what would happen if some tourist got whacked by an buffalo with a stone headed arrow is farfetched, but farfetched things do happen, what if the buffalo with an arrow in it just stood along the road and had some tourists video it? That nearly identical thing DID happen. One of the times I mentioned where a station manager said, "no more bowhunters". A bowhunter with a compound and lightweight arrows got no penetration and did no real damage to the buffalo, BUT that bull with MILLIONS of acres to roam, chose to run across the road in front of the station managers toyota with the arrow still hanging out on the visible side, what are the odds of that? It only took one person(Steve Irwin) to get sport croc banned in Australia, gainst all common sense. The less they get involved with buffalo hunting the better!

[tradtusker]

agree 100% with that Rick
and your analogy on tourists getting stomped by a wounded buff is not all that far fetched, wont be the first time a wounded buff gave someone a touch up, and like you said if it happens to the wrong people, person it could easily spell the end of bowhunting the big stuff out there.

hows the situation with the crocs there now?
the station i worked on out there where having some problems with the crocs, said they where seeing crocs where they had never seen them before, small ones getting pushed further and further out.

[Rick McGowan]

tradtusker, they say there are as many crocs in OZ now as there was when the white man first showed up. The government has 600 permits to give out per year to the aborigines and for problem crocs. Very, very few of those get used. The plan was to give 20 or 30 of those to outfitters in the NT to sell to sport hunters who of course are only going to shoot the biggest ones, which are also usually the "problem" crocs, so everyone would win, no more crocs would be killed than there is now, it would save the government money since their trapper wouldn't have to be catching as many problem crocs and the NT would be collecting lots of foreign $$$$$ from the sport hunters, BUT Steve Irwin decided he didn't want sport hunters shooting "HIS CROCS"(exact quote)and used his personal friendship with the minister in charge of such things to stop the croc hunting. So instead of hunters coming there and spending lots of dollars the station hands will just shoot the bigs crocs and leave them to rot or the government trapper will have to be sent out to catch them and most of the really big crocs that get caught, die from the stress. I talked to the government trapper a couple years ago near Katherine, he stopped me and asked if I had a rifle, and would I please put a half grown buffalo out of its misery, it had been hit by a truck and was laying on the side of the road with a broken spine. He was there responding to complaints about a big croc in the creek where the local kids swim. He told me already that year(May)he had caught NINE maneating sized crocs out from under the Katherine bridge in the local swimming hole!

[chrisg]

Hello Woody,
The article is in Primitive Archer june/july 2008
Written by Billy Berger. It is interesting and has good photos. His thesis is that the small 'bird points' were possibly not for birds at  all and gave good penetration on small and medium game, being narrow and probably shot from light weight bows. The Native American bows that exist all seem to be at or below 45# on average. This mechanical advantage fits  part of Ashby's criteria for a good head on big game. Berger did get good penetration in most cases on a white tail doe carcass. That is 10". The points managed to break ribs going in or exiting,only one actually made it out the other side. All good enough on a white tail so far but what is concerning is this paragraph in his conclusions:
"I had hoped to recover the bird points after the test so that I could analyze their breakage; unfortunately most of them were obliterated after hitting bone." Also "the other bird points had broken out of their hafts when their bases snapped and were never found" I assume on impact with bone?
What this says to me is that the 'penetration' of some or all of the arrows that hit a rib going in was just the foreshaft and not a cutting arrow point at all. He recovered two points, one was undamaged and had not hit any bone at all. The other suffered an impact fracture. What seems to be shown is that small, sharp, stone points will go through a deer of about 150-170#. If they hit a rib bone they break while also shattering that rib bone. If that is the case it is only the arrow foreshaft that penetrates any further, not a lot of clean cutting edge in that to cause the blood loss and damage to vital organs. In pre-historical times a hunter may have hunted with several companions and as a group they could put four of five arrows like that into the animal. He describes a human skeleton found with 14 points in the rib cage. In modern hunting scenarios it is doubtful any station manager would be happy with that many hits from a bow as an objective, assuming it were possible to deliver them on a water buffalo. We will always be compared with guns like it or not. A buff would not stand about while you tried anyway!

It is a very interesting article and he set the experiment up carefully, keeping the carcase intact with internal organs, fresh and upright.. I think a similar set up with a waterbuff might be educational. I'd like to see the frame to hold it upright though!He used obsidian, north Georgia chert and Burlington chert. He had two sets of arrows with and without foreshafts on cane arrows. With foreshafts ave weight 461gr without ave313gr. Arrow speeds 139fps and 128fps out of a 40# stickbow.  
chrisg

[Rick McGowan]

I'd like to meet those hunters that can put a bull buff up on that frame! Its a pretty big deal much of the time to roll them over for photos. What crisg says makes a lot of sense and is inline with what I have read before. It never made sense to me that those really small points were called "bird" points, why would you use a really small point on a really small target, when I shoot at birds or other small game I use a really big judo point. Archeologists frequently come up with stuff that dosn't make any sense to someone with experience, but we assume, because they spent time in school for it that they must know what they are talking about. I also read somewhere years ago about the poundage of bows used in North America by the indians and inuits etc. and it very much depended on what game was in their area. In the areas where they only had small game and  whitetails, they had no need for heavier bows, in areas with elk, moose, bison etc. they had much heavier bows, but somehow today, we often hear that ALL the indians used bows in the very lightweight range.

[Richie Nell]

Hey guys...First of all, I have no idea about having an idea concerning anything regarding hunting african game.  You guys seem to spend a decent amount of time hunting in Africa.  My question is how on God's wonderful creation do you guys afford it.  Without being too nosy...are you very wealthy?  or is there another way to get it done?
Thanks...I just had to ask.

[tradtusker]

work hard, set out your priorities

[knife river]

chrisg, thanks for the info on the article.  Birdpoints are small and delicate -- nothing I would ever use.  For that matter, points of that size aren't legal in any state I'm aware of...  

There are several ethnographic accounts of plains indian bison hunts where arrows were aimed at the liver/diaphragm area.  Heart and lungs were not the primary target.  They put an arrow in the liver and moved on to another animal (these were horseback hunts).  If those reports are accurate, it seems the hunters were completely aware of the limitations of the little side-notched points which were used to kill bison for thousands of years on the plains.

As for a human skeleton found with 14 points in the rib cage, that sort of thing has been seen several times.  Seems to be ritualized torture.  Way back when, I worked on a dig in Alabama.  It was a Mississippian site (just prior to European contact).  Found two adult males with no grave goods (a little unusual).  Both had been beheaded, although skulls were included in the burial.  Hands had been chopped off (not included) and the femurs broken.  Trunk of the bodies were full of small triangular arrow points -- probably 50 or more in each. Quite a few were in the pelvic area.  Nasty stuff.  Seeing as how those folks used some of the symbolism and architectural ideas of the Aztecs, they probably shared some of the same gruesome cultural practices.

[chrisg]

Thanks Woody for clearing that up, I was aware of the horseback hunts, a skilled rider can get super close and shoot for soft areas. What I wanted to show was that in a modern hunting context this would be frowned upon leaving a bowhunter the choice of heart/lung as a target for a one shot kill, hence penetration through ribs is a must. The little bird points are delicate but brittle too which you mentioned. SO what options are there? A quartering away shot is not advised with steel points so it is supreme accuracy and threading the arrow between a rib? I must add I have no experience with using stone aside from building with it. I have tried knapping a bit, I was a potter for years and porcelain breaks like good agate or obsidian. I have your dvd and read a lot. I have a friend who knaps a bit, I am in awe of the skill required.
Those ritual torture graves sound grim...Life was ugly and brutal more so than we like to think.
chrisg

[Rick McGowan]

kr,uuhhh!
chrisg, on a water buffalo, it would be impossible to put an arrow into the vitals, any of them, without hitting a rib. Broadside is actually the best angle, the ribs go all the way back to just in front of the pelvis and the ones aft of the shoulder muscle are three times as thick as the ones under the shoulder muscle.