10/16/2026
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🦌 KNOW YOUR DEER ANATOMY 🦌
PART 10: AN AERIAL VIEW 🦅
Understanding Depth, Overlap & the Wound Path
Throughout this series, we’ve explored individual organs, their blood supply, and what their injuries can mean for recovery.
Now, let’s look at how they fit together—from above! 👀
📍 FIRST, GET YOUR BEARINGS
Imagine looking down over a standing deer’s back, with its head pointing away from you.
⬅️ Your left is the deer’s LEFT.
➡️ Your right is the deer’s RIGHT.
When asked, "Which side of the deer is entry?" this is the correct anatomical positioning to remember! The illustration is a schematic cutaway: organs are exposed to explain their relationships. They overlap at different depths rather than sitting together in one flat layer!
🫁 LUNGS
Occupy both sides of the chest, forward of the diaphragm. They surround much of the heart and change shape as the deer breathes! When a deer exhales, their lungs actually shrink forward and hitting them can become difficult due to becoming a maller target!
❤️ HEART
Sits low in the chest, between the lungs. From above, it lies deeper toward the breastbone—not up against the spine. It's in the pump that drives blood supply for all organs, and functions in the body!
🟠 DIAPHRAGM
A curved muscular partition separating the chest from the abdomen. Its dome projects forward into the chest; it isn’t a straight dividing line. This muscle is responsible for causing inhalation and exhalation. How? Put your had on your belly, inhale, and you will feel your belly push your hard forward. This is the diaphragm pushing them down and causing a "suction effect" with your lungs that causes air to fill them! Exhaling, "releases" this hold and air comes out!
🌿 STOMACH / RUMEN
The deer has one stomach with four compartments. The large rumen dominates the left abdomen and extends toward the right. Its fullness affects the space available to surrounding structures. Usually a hit to other abdominal organs also involved some form of stomach involvement as well.
🏗️🏭 LIVER
Lies forward in the abdomen, against the diaphragm, predominantly on the deer’s right side. Many popular deer anatomy diagrams shot this organ on both sides of the body. This is incorrect and does not mean it is an equal, matching target immediately beneath both sides! The actually organ on the left side is the spleen!
❓ SPLEEN
Attached along the upper left surface of the rumen, toward its forward portion. It is the important, blood-rich organ that many simplified deer diagrams and targets leave out! This is a low pressure system filled mostly with venous blood, so a marginal hit here may be a slow bleed. If it is center punched though, hemorrhage is very likely!
🫘 KIDNEYS
Sit high in the abdomen beneath the spine. The right kidney lies farther forward; the rumen displaces the left kidney toward the right and closer to the midline. They are not a perfectly symmetrical pair beside the pelvis like most mammals.
🤏🏽🦣 SMALL & LARGE INTESTINES
Occupy much of the remaining abdominal space, largely to the right of the rumen. Their loops overlap, and the colon includes a coiled portion—not just a straight route toward the tail.
🔵 BLADDER
Lies near the pelvis. As it fills, it can expand farther forward into the abdomen. It receives urine from the kidneys through the ureters.
🏹 WHY DOES KNOWING THE ORGANS LIKE THIS MATTER AFTER THE SHOT?
A broadside view shows height and length. An aerial view adds width and helps us understand what lies along the wound’s path.
• A left-side entry may encounter different structures, in a different order, than a right-side entry.
• Quartering angles change which organs line up.
• Elevated shots travel downward through different depths.
• One arrow or bullet can damage several structures.
The entry hole tells us where the wound began—not everywhere it went.
🐕 WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR RECOVERY?
Tell your tracking team which side was the entry, the deer’s angle, your elevation, the apparent entry, pe*******on and any confirmed exit. Combine that information with the arrow, blood, hair, tissue and digestive material. A diagram helps reconstruct possibilities; it cannot confirm the injury by itself. Drawing blood also doesn't mean the animal should or will die. This is a false security many hunters believe that just because they hit the animal, it will also eventually expire.
⭐ THE TAKEAWAY
Organs have depth. They overlap. Their positions are not identical from both sides.
Understanding the entire wound path gives us a better foundation for interpreting the sign and planning recovery efforts.
onX Hunt
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