Believing ‘it won’t happen to me’ is an inevitable human attitude. Thinking positively about future events and performance is called ‘optimism bias’. You tend to believe you have control over your life, much more than you actually do.
But when hunting, there are many factors that can lead to a variance in shot placement. Regardless of experience, circumstances on the day may result in wounding a target animal rather than cleanly despatching it. For example, we might inadvertently deviate from the principles of marksmanship, snatch a trigger or suffer ‘buck fever’. The animal may ‘jump the string’ when bowhunting. The nature of the terrain can make the shot distance misleading, or