JP -

With a little practice, and at those short ranges, I hit them in a large muscle mass; usually the ham, but sometimes the shoulder meat, on occasion, even in the neck.

In about 1982 or 1983, I helicopter darted some wolves in the Susitna. Two days later, a couple of them were harvested by land-and-shoot hunters. Those were the two I necropsied. I originally used a Palmer Cap-chur rifle with a fairly heavy aluminum dart. One wolf was hit in the front shoulder; the other in the lower mid-back. The Palmer darts have an internal charge (.22 blank) that discharges the drug into the wolf. This causes undue injury, as well as the dart just hitting the animal. Remember E = mc2? The "force" is dependent on the weight of the projectile, but more so, the "force" is dependent on the speed squared. Slowing down the dart is not an option (hard enough to hit them from a helicopter anyway), but going with a lighter dart (the blow-gun darts are light plastic) and delivering that dart much slower reduces that trauma.

Jack