Ed Ashby's Rhino's and The Natal Study Detail

yo yo it's a fairy have you ever thought about you could just sit around with Dr Ed Ashby and ask him questions well Ryan and Chris who were the winners of the uh raffle for the donations to the Ashby Foundation these guys right here they're going to be in a video upcoming they were the winners and they got to sit around and talk to the man himself so this is a relatively long video we discuss flying planes underwater shooting two rhinos how them to tall study came about and its impact on bow hunting the African continent forward to Center window to 650 grains matter broadheads Edge bevels all kind of good stuff this is worth a listen and you need to pay attention there's a lot to chew here stay tuned [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] thank all right you are live I am live I'm not so let's hear the the Rhino story all right uh the way I got involved in in the tall study God had to step in I had written to South Africa to ask them could I hunt a rhino with B era and they said no archery hunting is not legal in in South Africa and I forgot all about it and five years later theal Parks Board decided they wanted to look at Bow Hunting as a possibility just to increase the economics of of hun in in South Africa where could you hunt in Africa at that time uh only in countries that had no regulation every country in Africa where bow hunting was mentioned at all in the game laws was to prohibited there was no affirmative bow hunting law said you could bow hunt anywhere in Africa and you and I have talked I think you said there was three three countries that had the that didn't they didn't address it they let you go yep uh you could hunt in uh mosm Beek and Kenya to it closed up in uh tangena so you could hunt in those countries and that's just because they just that's because it was silent no ways and me have a lot against it yeah uh so other than that you you couldn't bow hunt at all but anyway they decided okay we're going to we're going to look at bow hunting and see how viable it is and they were having their meeting planning all this stuff and one of the questions came up is you know could you shoot the big animals you know how successful would that be for B hunters and one of the guys and I think it was Spud letting him but I'm not sure they never told me who it was but one of the guys there said uh you know somebody wrote us years ago wanting to hun a rhino and said I think I might have his letter and he went and looked and found my letter and they called me and said are you still interested in coming to Africa to shoot a rhino well I didn't have to think very long before giving them an answer and that I've only paid for Safari twice all my other Honey's been free in afca because I live moved over there and lived there but uh I wasn't living here at that time I was still working for the government and and uh so I went over there to to do this rhino hunt and uh we were uh the hunt Spud came up to watch the hunt and Chris Freeman to two of the game senior game Rangers and Spud was head of Nal Parks Board and uh they they followed me know they literally guided me on the hunt essentially and that that Rhino I got to 18 yards on big bull quite big easily the world's record but I'm anti- reccord book so I never put him in there I got the 18 yards and put the first air in and the penetration wasn't great but it looked like at the time looking at it might be in the second lung possibly and it ran long way high high blood volume takes a long time to bleed out I don't know the exact distance but it was a long Falling Up job and uh it was dead on his feet but we didn't know it and I got into 10 yards and and shot it second shot and it took one step and went down and uh but the whole time I was over there they were telling me about what they were trying to do and after after they saw that and realized that okay you know I'm a legitimate bow hunter uh they said would you like to come back next year we're going to we'd like to repeat another Rhino and then we're going to mauzi park for a month for 30 days and we're going to do a call before the rifle call because you got a limited space for animals they have take a huge volume off every year and said one of the things we want to look at is various equipment yeah now I'm covering all my I wasn't paid for any this I was covered my own expenses and I had to covered for the second hunt to and uh so I bought ARA setups and different broadheads and I had I think 34 or 32 different broad heads that I took over and several different era setups different weights all t uh ready to go and uh we went back over there and first to repeat the Ryo and I guess I'll put that story in right here we would go out in the morning and everywhere we saw a rhino track crossing they would drop off one of The Trackers to go look at the Rhino cuz they wanted to shoot designated rhino ones that were old Bulls beyond their breeding age still holding a territory so the young Bulls couldn't get a territory and breed so the herd wasn't going to grow until somebody removed and uh we had dropped off all the trackers well there was a rhino that we had seen two or three times before down in this Valley and it was just Chris Freeman and I left and uh we saw it down in the valley and every time we had seen this rhino and tried to stalk him he had gone out of this Valley the same way up through this cut we could see between two mountains two hills and Chris said okay said I'm going to give you about 45 minutes or so he said you get up in that cut find you a place up there and said I'm going to stalk you just like we've been doing and he's probably going out the same way see if you need shop well I've started up this Ravine and I'm going up and going up and just get narrow and narrow and narrow and steeper and steeper and I got up where it topped out into a flat open plane and it's about the width between these from side to side and the banks are like this and there's a trail on the bottom and there's a trail 3T F feet high on this side of the where and I look okay tracks are in the bottom so real I stand on the upper trail and I wait and I wait pretty soon I hear rocks rolling I'm all set and I'm waiting I got Delila in my big heavy air and I'm set and I cut my eyes around that damn R was only the up Trail about 20 25 yards away and I thought you what I do how am I going to get away from this thing and it took a couple more steps and went down on the bottom Trail and it came by me to you me to your knee and I shot him that's all I was concentrated on the whole time was making the shot and he didn't know what happened you know there was this light blow on him he he ran straight out into the flat made a couple of circles took off and uh we measured it was from my tracks heads on a diagonal was 7 ft and that's the only animal I ever shot that after the shot I shook like a leaf cuz it dawned on me after it was over that that was stupid all he had to do was turn his head and he had me 7 ft's a little too close for an animal that yeah for that side you know he's 6,000 lb animal you know they're double the size of a black rhino and uh Chris was down there with his 458 somewhere back in the valley damn that was stupid but anyhow we got a second Rhino and so I left that night going to uh mauzi to hunt with Tony Tomkinson who was a chief game Ranger at mauzi and uh they wanted us the shooting the animals they wanted me to take shots any shot I thought I could make from any angle don't wait for a perfect shot we want to see how the era systems perform when you when it doesn't hit where you intended you know when the animals turn animals move you know but because Tony was had experimented something with bow hunting there in mauzi and doing some of the initial research so he knew that hey and he shot a compound 80 uh Martin Waterhog 85b and uh so even with that setup shooting that fast he knew that you know you're going to have these bad shots so I did but we were back with a rifle if we needed it so anytime we thought the shot was not lethal or potentially not lethal uh that the shooter would put it down with a rifle with a remote from where the air had hit usually head neck shot or mostly neck shots uh so we didn't lose any any of the animals were shot they were they were all all put down one way or the other then we would do a field dissection and look at the performance of that era and that setup and record all the data off of it and uh that's where I started building my my database and I was collecting a huge amount of information about 118 points U I don't think I ever added anything to the database after that uh off of each shot so we're tracking a lot of things if we could not determine on a field autopsy The lethality of the shot they had veterinarians on staff two of them and so they would take the animal back to the veterinarians they would dissect it and tell you exactly this would have been lethal this wouldn't here's what was hit you know took all all guess work out of it and when it was over we started looking at the the information and the information that came out of it the one thing that came out of it that absolutely amazes me looking backwards is and I made that statement in the right up that when a heavy bone was hit it appeared that 650 grains was the minimum Arrow Mass to break heavy bone and in years you know 26 years of testing afterwards ex a lot of it intensely focused solely on heavy bone threshold focal stud that's 650 grain give or take a little bit right around 6 50 depend on the a setup uh is what it takes to break heavy bones and that doesn't appear to have changed in what we got so far using any compounds it doesn't matter what it is uh F has no effect on on that but uh in the 30 days shot 100 I shot 154 animals U and people always say well you did all you're testing on Buffalo no we started out with we were shooting Mor Hogs Impalas inalas zebra Kudo you know all sorts we didn't shoot e on that one for the audience's sake um what's a heavy bone H just for the audience I I I shot that with with Lady no what's the what would you define as a heavy a heavy bone oh a heavy bone yeah um just for the audience to say yeah we're looking at humorous femur uh pelvic girdle on the bigger animals spine when as you get into the bigger ones uh those are Bas are bigger animal scapular Ridge gets to be a heavy bone and even even uh down on the head of the of the scapula big animal was the combination of the scapula laying on top of the spine something that was like really difficult I've always thought that it was not particular the the era setups that literally tore through the the scapula take the scapula flat cuz that's kind of where the spine is uh would penetrate deep enough in there and uh what became my Benchmark Broadhead back then the grizzly turned out to be the best performing head followed by a head called a maxi head that's no longer made and then in a wide cut the been Pearson dead head those were the three best heads out of the whatever we had 32 or 42 I don't remember the number I'd have to look at the data that's 560 years ago it hard to recall that stuff back that four uh but anyway we put all that now they were looking at a lot of other things they had people looking at the stress factor on the animals that were shot the stress factor that was involved with the animals accompanying the animals we shot uh time to collapse MH uh distance travel to collapse uh all sorts of things like that that they were they were tracking but my part was strictly the Broadhead the terminal ballistics yeah right you know from Impact with the animal to era stopped right that's the part I was doing and and I sent wrote my part and sent it in they put it all together with their stuff and submitted it to the entire Parks Board and uh natal legalized bow hunting except for the pack derms which I had recommended against because the equipment the arrow setups at that point I didn't think were adequate out of the bows that most people could shoot mhm to be able to take the big animals a safety thing it's safety thing safety for both the Hunter and the professional Hunter yeah and uh cuz you're stupid in sh to Rhino at 7 fet right and people ask me you know how did you get to do that well I was the only person dumb enough to do it yeah right literally but once they legalized bow hunting in Nal first affirmative bow hunting law in all of Africa within a year uh Zimbabwe and uh Botswana Namibia and Zambia all legalized bow honey now mosambi to this day still has no ways and means you didn't go spear hunting for them I think Tim Well's dead in mosm be MH um so you know and it's spread all over Africa now all of West Africa has legal bow hunting you know North Africa that legal up in there now when did when did natal approve it what year 70 no no uh 1980 the end either right at the end of 85 or the start of 86 so then Bo hunting's only been affirmatively yeah we know people running around doing it but yeah um since 86 roughly yeah it's because of the steud yeah because of it's all steady and because you shot a rhino first why did they chipped you off kind of they gave you a tall order there let's just shoot a rhino first we're not going to mess around with the Imp and that's crazy yeah that's what we started with first animal was Rhino second second time I went back first animal Rhino yeah if I'm want to die they want me to die quick yeah right they didn't believe you so they were trying to smash you well that was literally it that's the reason they wanted to repeat it they said was this a fluke yeah right that's fair that's a big animal right yeah yeah so tell us a bit about like your your arrow setup and I know you talked about the Broadhead and everything but you know what well two two different broadheads I used the the uh uh first time around again doing it over had we done the the mauzi part first I would probably have used the grizzly but because I knew it had taken black Rano before I used the Howard Hill which has some real flaws in it I discovered in as we did the later test uh at muzi the time we through with mauzi I knew and I had shot Howard Hills for a long time I that that's it has flaws big flaws but I was fortunate uh to get through I didn't hit dead center on the heavy rib is the only reason I got the amount of penetration I did now I was shooting a fulllength 2419 with a fiberglass shaft inside not not carbon fiberglass shaft inside it and uh all the weight I could pack into that air was 1286 brain it was not high FOC I had never tested I didn't know anything nobody was talking about F then as a penetration Factor U so it was it was total unknown quantity and the second Rhino because the Howard Hill didn't perform like I wanted to when I did test shots on the rhin first Rhino after he was down for the second time I took a triangular file 7 in long and turned it down where fit the shaft and sharpened it as best I could along his you know steep angles there and then I took P Bond and broke triangles off of single blade brazer blades and bonded them to it and then baked it in the oven to toughen it and they stayed on through the bone worked and it it did well that that had of course and I had changed of course the I actually ended up with the exact same weight I stayed 1286 G on both of them but the shaft was much much shorter cuz I had a much much heavier point and would have had high FOC that I didn't know made any difference at all all I can tell you for sure is that the second a are sure well penetrated better than the first one and uh but you couldn't there was no way to find the forward to Center thing until carbon came along well you don't you you could well you did it but you didn't know what you what did my friend well I did it by accident there but we weren't measuring FC no nobody talked about F yeah right you you read the East and stuff and they had just what they got now yeah you know that for targets you need 6 to 10% uh you know you use 12 to 15 on Hunting eras MH that that's that was all it was and and based on I don't think it's based on any kind of results they just pulled them numbers out of some dark location and uh so that's a question a lot of people have I would say you discovered for the center is an aerodynamic well no there were a couple of people how did you figure it out well there were a couple of people uh traditional archers mhm that were posting stuff about they were using High forward Center not nearly as high as I went up but that they were noticing they got better penetration and I actually put a post shows you how wrong you can be when you don't have nothing to base it on and said I didn't think it was going to make much difference but I would test it mhm and when I tested it I discovered that you know next to structural integrity and perfect flight FC is it biggest Aid in penetration when all else is equal in the air MH and uh and then I then I got off on this thing of okay is there enough for limit how much is well I could only the highest hour we could get because we didn't have the components we got today was 31.6% MH and it it was amazing and of course I was tracking the percentage gain per percentage increase and it goes up geometrically so this first increase gives you that much MH the next increase gives you that much the next one gives you that much and then that much it builds on each one and as you start to get to those upper ones you're looking at like a 10 11% increase in penetration for a 1% perc increase in FOC but you got to get it up in those levels and once you get there every fraction of an ounce starts to count when you take it off the rear end of the air right loading the front end now makes very little change but taking it off the back end and lightening up that long rear lever arm right makes a huge difference I weighed my vein my feathers the other day all four of my feathers are six grains yeah one vein W is six grains yep and you just get free Center my veins are six grains my whole all my my feather set is I'm talking about just one of my veins six that's Four Feathers I use the tack driver two seven five they're six grain and and you can you know depending on what you're shooting and and your shooting style and how good you are with it uh like these high F's at Rob's building you can get down to a 2in three fleta they look funny I've never I've never tried them aside from when I'd shoot like try to recurve I I shoot the two inas online at 715 grains and they're about 28% and they just I'm going to try them well you do have to tune them you know everybody's going to be different and the FC that you've got is going to make a difference as is the windsh of the Broadhead I've got all the stuff in my house to you know tune my bow and build arrows and stuff and I I like messing around and seeing seeing what changes so one more question for the audience I know the answer but be good to hear you say it what when does 650 not matter well when everything goes perfect plan plan super a the plan a era is the minimum that will kill on a perfect shot but how often does everything go perfect right excrement happens you've told me you've told me that it moves yeah where how much does it move a bunch Plan B it's it's Factor 12 oh if you're building a 12 Factory era on standard size animals it brings the point that it has now opened up any shot angle you you can go go in through the humorous out through the hip on an elk right you you can shoot just forward of the hip on a needing or a moose and come out to front and have complete pass through but that's a 12 Factor arrow that is a 12 Factor ERA with the right Broadhead too well that's part of the 12 factors you've got to have that real high 3 to one mechanical advantage which is the highest you can get right now uh I took the Grizzlies they were one and8 in and I took them down to 1 in wide and maintain the same taper and called it the modified Grizzly and then I experimented taking them down to what did we go 1316 I think was the smallest and it got smaller than that I could no longer sharpen the edge of 25° bevel cuz I was hitting the feral M and and uh so that was as near as I could go and uh I ended up the compromise and in the Broadhead I shot the bulk my game with was modified Grizzly do you have any at the house I probably still have some stuck on arrows so I need to go diing through the sea containers yeah I've given a lot of those away though so we'll have to look and see what's there oh I I probably still have I got a lot of erors still odds are there's still at least one or two in there yeah yeah but so many people wanted you know particularly Forge Woods because those were my hunting eras MH and uh so they may be gone they may not we we just have to look and see I'll have to come to Rock Springs and dig around yeah or I might have some know I've got boxes of stuff that you know got broadheads and field points and crap in it well you already gave me a whole pile of stuff man well I given everybody a whole pile of stuff all my are gone now and I've given all those away cuz I I couldn't pull up with this prow my hand I couldn't I couldn't pull a 15lb bow it's uh my day is shooting the bows over I did a lot of experiment with compounds too and that didn't appeal to me i' I'd rather handgun hunt tell you the truth than I had so I've done a lot of that too a lot of rifle gun hunting and stuff hunting with pistols good ch challenge what me you get Archer When you get AR when uh I was in the third grade Howard Hill came to my school promoting his movie Timba that was out in the movie theaters what year is that what would that have been 55 56 I think 1956 you born in 48 47 H what year were you born 46 in January 46 and uh yeah it was third grad he came and did stuff that they put you in jail for now he started his show we were all in Auditorium seated he started his show by walking in through the doors at the back shooting his arrows over everybody's head at a Target on as fast as he can shoot him about a dozen of them just and then he went on with the rest of his show cool princip yeah oh yeah and I never you know other than one time I I didn't know Howard Hill but uh I've hunted with Fred Bay and I've hunted with elementary school where' you go to elementary school Henderson Texas Henderson all right Tex yep U but but I went home that day cut down a Willow Branch stole some fishing line off dad's reel made me a bow cut some cane took his 10 sniffs and cut points out of uh 10 can Lids fasten them on there's sewing thread and went shoot now my bow lasted I don't know six or eight shots for it broke but I was hooked that was it and uh of course I was brought up his rifle dad was a rifle instructor so he he didn't discourage me but he didn't do a lot to encourage me either and uh so I and there was you know there's no such thing as archery clubs and things like that and I went to Josh Strickland Sporting Goods store and uh bought my first bows there and and they were all just you know they were five glass bows and you know things like that and uh had no idea what I do they they were all ambidex chef bides and when I when I got old enough that I could get employed doing summer jobs and weekend jobs and stuff digging ditches and putting on asphalt par asphalt roofs and stuff like that that was back breaking uh I saved up enough money to buy a good bow well there's no bow shop so I went back to Josh Strickland Sporting Goods store he pulls out his catalog Barry catalog and we're looking ah there he goes okay I can afford this and it was a bar codiak and uh so said w't order one and he said right hand or left hand I said huh and he says you got to order right-handed or left-handed well I was right-handed so or a right-hand bow God didn't discover all this time he been shooting left-handed how heavy was that bow which one the first one you ordered the first good bow 42 lbs how old were you 11 something like that but I had made the mistake of the second second bow that I'd bought was a Paul bun on green fiberglass 55 lb you know and if I got my jaw set and crossed my eyes and puckered up my rear end I could pull it for one or two shots and then I had to drop back and and the third bow that I got was from uh uh perers and it was a kind of brown and white strip fber glass again andrius and that's the boy I really learned to shoot with and started doing a lot of shooting small game and dragon flies and bumblebees and a lot of bow fishing and and I was bow fishing without fish ARS you know live right there on the lake I mean he's 200 yards back of the house and go down there a lot of guard and you get those guard and you know you try to shoot him when he comes up mud water so you can't see him for just before he roll a lot of this fast really fast shooting at at Targets and uh just shooting him with you could buy uh Ben Pearson these little target arrows just with like a bullet point on the front 25 cents a piece and that's what I I shot a fish with but I wasn't shooting them down in the water shoot just the top roow and then I'd wait till everything settle down and you wait out there with all the snakes Turtles and oh there he is try to recover your fish a lot of times you couldn't get him but a lot of times you could and and shot a lot of bullfrogs and shot one duck just flew away with my arrow and uh I decided those bullet points really weren't good for ducts in M uh and and in ton of snake that plate covered with snakes East Texas got more snakes than any place in the world I've ever been and and uh so I got a lot of practice youting them too and besides blowing them with cherry bombs which great fun and oh you know and about the time I got that first good bow Bob Lee founder Wing Archer uh established the first bow hunting only lease in Texas at Wheelock right up here with Brian College Station and got I got on that lease and uh we had 120 families that could bow hunt on there now not everybody in Every Family bow hunting but we had a lot of bow hunters and it was just only 1800 acres and not everybody hunted you know everybody's there all the time oh it was really packed opening week usually sure uh Christmas person nobody down there I always hun Christmas down there without fail school break Christmas I was gone hunt uh and and I hunted that that first year with that hunted there several years until the lease was taken out from MERS for people that paid a lot more money than we could pay and uh so I had several years there and gradually I worked my way up that's where you didn't have the Rivalry between archery companies then that you got now there were very few archery companies and uh Fred Bear came down and hunted and Ben Pearson came down and hunted on the lease with Bob Lee and I remember standing out there at noon roing in The Big Field there but where the the camp house and and where the campg ground and all over everybody Camp uh roaming around out there and swapping bows with each other to shoot and of course Fred Bear left-handed so he give that off B they have shoot left-handed with it and uh but you know it was nice that they cared about AR and they cooperated and they didn't they didn't have a rivalry with each other even though economically they were competitors Arch was just growing it was just getting started in the in the country and uh I I became real good friends with Ben Pearson you when I I stayed on his place up in Arkansas and uh he gave me great advice uh and he's the one that got me over to a heavy limb slow Longbow because he recognized right away that I had some kind of problem with my release and it's because of bone structure in my hand that I didn't know I had that my my bones on part of my hand grow too long and it causes them to curve just like my feet do it's just spre not a red ter it was a I was just born with him that way so I'm I'm stuck with it but I didn't know that uh but he looked it watched me shoot and he said you get a longbow as long as you can get it so that that's going to reduce your string angle you want real thick heavy slow Limb and you concentrate on following through after your shot so what's important to you is you don't let your Bow hand your bow arm move till that area Hits the Target and he said it doesn't matter and I've tried it later on and he was right you can take your string out two or three inches from your face and still hit your Target because those limbs are so heavy and it's so slow it pulls the string back into the line long before the arrow leaves it's the most forgiving bow you can shoot and it has a lot of other honey advantages that I earn later going through live and uh even though I went on to shoot a lot more recurves and compounds and I went back to the longbow it's it's the best hunting weapon for my style of hunting hands down no question about it uh it I always looked at it that the Longbow like that the hill style Longbow is to bow hunting what a double rifle is to big game hunting big dangerous game hunting it is not the most accurate in the world but it's accurate enough for the job at hand is light to handle and fast to handle those are things that were important in being able to shoot it had versatility you know because that AA is sitting just above my hand it's literally like that so when I rotate my bow it's versally rotating around the axis of the air so I could tilt that bow any direction I wanted past you know past horizontal and I can tilt it back this way and because your fingers shooting Mediterranean split finger is putting tension on the knock of the arrow it keeps the Arrow against the bow you don't have to hold and you can shoot with a bow horizontal back the other direction so that opens up a versatility when you're a stalking Hunter to be able to take shots from all body positions in relation of the game sure without having to turn move your feet make all that movement to to get in position to shoot and I can shoot it sitting flat on my butt on the ground laying on my stomach laying on my back you know I practice all those shots I even practice flipping the bow over and shooting it left left hand with the AR just right on my hand right there at the Shelf still on my hand and of course none of those are center Shot bows either so I can't do that with my comound no no well when I was up in Minnesota all but one of my friends shot compound M and uh we used to have a shooting game where it was follow me and whoever had the closest shot got to pick the next shot and we usually shot for beers or drinks or you know something like that and all I had to do was win one shot and buddy that game was mine because I'd pick shots where they couldn't put their bow straight up and down and that was it it was over I I went every shot from a on great fun anything else anybody wants to know about I can B us all day if you keep asking questions remember stories said about whatever was that professional job before yeah yeah I an I doctor by profession okay I was in the Air Force for 10 years essentially nine years eight months six days or something like that then I transferred over to the commission core of the Public Health Service and I worked on Texas state of Texas no I worked on the Indian reservations I started out in Minnesota working on Red Lake reservation and then I moved to the area office where I had was responsible for the eye care in a seven state area that was became I still did some clinical work but mostly uh administrative work and there were some real problems in the Indian Health Service and I was a whistleblower and after that which which is not long story in sou but anyway I'm one of the few people got a nice letter from Congress it says I am an honest gentleman uh whistleblowers weren't weren't W no I went I went through a lot of Hell before they relented and and did they they said oh once fishal reports in your record they can't be removed [ __ ] they sent me to Washington to stand there and watch them pull them out and replace them under the order of Congress but then they gave me you know options of where to go well they were just opening up a position with the Bureau of Prisons for the chief of eye care for the nation so I took that position and I spent my last four years working for the Federal Bureau of PRS and uh where where what state were you living in well I was my home base was at Butner North Carolina okay but I you know I traveled to places all around um did you have a family uh part of the time they no kids but was married twice you which proves it takes a while to learn but uh I can I can be taught if you hit me enough times uh so when is your old when did you start really just being a hun old oh I grew up a h 100 dad started me shooting competition rifle at age four shot in my first rifle match at age five okay and I have still got the 22 that I learned to hunt on and and started my target career with so Remington 521t and dad would give me 122 shell and if I could bring something back kill something I could have another one and I could do that all day long first time I missed through for the day and go again tomorrow but for the day you're done you miss what did your dad do for ran a motel Texas yep and uh it it was good all the things you could do as a kid then and the things parents did they'd lock you up for now that'd be child neglect yeah when did you go when did you you hunted all the time when did you first fall in love with Africa sound like that uh I went the first hunt was 75 in rodesia and like a lot of people that go I thought this is expensive you know damn cheap but today standards thought this is expensive this will be my one only the trip well before I was even close to finish my Safari I was trying to figure out how I could get back but uh fortunately the professional hunter that I had then was Gordon Cormac we became tremendous friends and I went back to numerous trips on on to Africa hunting with people I knew people he knew for free not paying any anything for the honey and but not getting any trophies from ring back out of it either but you know still still getting to hunt and I I knew shortly after that that that it was only till I could economically afford to retire when my retirement was big enough I could live comfortably on that that was it I was going going to quit and I did I quit I liquidated everything I owned in North America except my library which I did stor with a friend and moved to Africa bought me a place there what year uh that was in 19 started 1994 okay and uh so how long were you in Africa before I was kicked out in 2001 towards the end of the year don't remember the exact month made seven years now this is s years there seven years is my thing I was stationed with the Air Force 7 years in Alaska then I was in Africa 7 years do lot Alaska oh yeah what just kill you B Alaska I took most of the big stuff never I never even then you had to have permit for muscs so I didn't get muscock didn't get wallers but I got most of the other stuff I got you got you got the G I got Grizzly and brown bear and black bear up there my first black bear got the car got car doll sheep goat wolf moose what your station at a in Fairbanks Y how many uh how many animals would you say that you killed total now yeah probably and now I'm just having to estimate because up till I started the study well actually before that two uh 80 1982 I started keeping records so the first 25 years I I got on records what about just like large game and stuff you have a rough idea I rough idea is very close to 2,000 most of those are with uh like along yeah right yeah and in in those later years I've got 627 kills and four failures to recover that out out of 6 631 animals total I had four or9 recoveries wow well 631 total 627 recovered four not recover and two of the non recovering PS that I shot eight eight about 8 seconds apart and I could see them on the mud flat dead but I could not recover one was a mule there in Colorado and I waited followed the blood trail went down the mountain at the Jeep Road it ended in a gut pile tire tracks human tracks here gone somebody found just picked it up for got downam here yep and and I lost a bear in Minnesota that when I shot it I was right the edge of the swamp way back in I had some Rons it's to wh motorbikes you what they are tires like tractor tires and uh you can get way back in cuz the whole thing was Flo but I couldn't get all the way back in there I get with about a mile where it was and I'd walk back in there and this one of them better SES and uh several decent size bear look like coming to the bay and I shot that bear and the First Leap he made was in the swamp water and I it's cold weather too it's fall I waited out as far as I could go in that swamp and that was it there was little toughs of little hummocks of bushes and stuff all out through there yeah but it was deep water and it's so far back in had no way to get a a canoe or kayak or anything back in there I'm assuming out of 631 animals large game animals that you shot right probably a fair amount of those are deer El there's there's North American stuff deer elk Mo on the west coast and uh not a whole lot West Coast will you know you want count Alaska right you know Southeast Alaska Island it's all it's all the same terain and stuff we got we got I lot Hy black tails and stuff out on monu and ABCs stuff like that using a bow that probably shot what like 150 per second uh no uh depending on the eror setup I was shooting uh you I can get close to 160 160 yeah that's about that's about it and that that was adequate using good heavy 12 Factor ER well no they weren't the 12 factors it took me all those 26 years of research and all of these on on we're doing the setup shots so we got about 5,000 shots to draw information from oh I see and I've got beyond the 5,000 I've got all those Focus studies well there's probably a thousand shots in just 10 heavy bone threshold looking at nothing but that erors of different setups um but from that I developed these these factors based on their percentage influence on the outcome penetration you know and the early Legends of archery all knew the penetration Z because Fred bear's got a state statement he made in like 1942 or three in ye silen Archer where he said any Arrow will kill a deer on a well-placed shot but what you need is an era that will crash through when the go gets rough and in hunting a hard way how Hill said all else equal penetration is the name of the game yeah and it is if you don't reach the vitals it doesn't matter what kind of cutwidth you got it doesn't matter anything you got to have the penetration and it's got to be something that's still sharp when it reaches those vital regardless of what it's gone through to get there mud hide you know 2 and 1/2 ft of gut you know you you've got to have that penetration and uh there's no question structur Integrity the most important thing even back in the to study yeah people always say the the oh the major reason not recovering animals you wasn't era wasn't well placed we didn't find that cuz we were putting down with rifles the shots that didn't look lethal right the number one failure is lack of adequate penetration and structural integrity was the number one fa in getting adequate penetration and perfect flight is what and that comes in the later study you've got to have that it's the the facilitator for your other factors to work you you've got to have that air flying straight and you want it flying straight as quickly as you can get it because that conserves era energy even when a high performance bow you're dealing with less energy than a 22 long rifle and when you start shooting big animals with a 22 long rifle you need to do everything you can to maximize the penetration you're going to get and that's what it's about with the eror is conserving the eror force and using it as much as possible to achieve penetration so the perfect flight gets you out of paradox as fast as possible and it also gives you a straight line Force when it hits now you get a paradox of the era or as I call impact Paradox when it hits cuz the Broadhead is now stop and the era is is going to bend like in an S curve you got to see it in slow motion to understand how much they been it it's dramatic yeah I've seen some videos and and you can mitigate a great amount of that with a high FOC and the high FOC also has the advantage of your long rear lever arm is now lighter Mass so it stops its oscillations much quicker it doesn't have the mass to keep going or whatever direction is oscillating in well it you want it to stop as quick in the penetration as possible because if it's still in this impact Paradox as it starts going through tissue that shaft is having to push the tissue back and forth and back and forth and that's bleeding off eror Force at a incredible rate so you know that's a another big advantage that you pick up out of the FOC you also get the real short forward lever arm which is now STI you know the analogist get you a qu inch Dow Rod or an eigh inch or 3/8 whatever you want to use hold it to the end and push it against that beam and you touch it back here and almost no Force at all Bo mhm shorten it up takes more Force to bow it you get right up here and try to push it and it doesn't bow at all so having that short forward lever arm it gives you the rigidity to get through skin hide bone and so forth with the front of the air and the light shaft is now not having you know to push the tissues as much because it's going to come out of paradox very quick we're conserving the Air Force then next Factor down you you look at mechanical advantage the Broadhead because a 3:1 mechanical advantage is basically taking the force of the air and tripling it it it's going to do three times as much work as you could with a one: one Mechanicals one each wide one each long and a lot of broadheads now particular most of the Mechanicals are way less than one mechanical advantage you're actually sucking the energy out of your arrow besides energy Tak takes up to deploy blades and and the amount of resistance most of those have conical points and chisel points and stuff like that which you can take one of those and get a get a hide and try to push it through yeah Rob was tell see the see the force and I never even thought about and then you get a a 20 or 25 degre single bevel very thin you can get it really sharp and you can just barely touch that height with almost no Force at all conserving a force and so it goes each factor down the line has contributed something but not as much as as those big four up front structural Integrity perfect Air flight uh F and mechanical advantage the broad here those are the the four absolute crucial ones but to get everything you can out of your air which becomes really important you shoot a light bow or you hunt the bigger animals you want to add as many factors on as you can way down at the bottom and people make a big deal you know Ashby says you got to shoot a 650 grain eror to kill deer no never said that never never will that's your heavy bone thresold That's Heavy bone threshold and all that means is when you hit the heavy bone threshold with impact on a heavy bone the frequency of penetrating the bone will increase right around 650 grains it's a big jump you know now if you've got a poor bone performance Broadhead it may penetrate a heavy bone 8% of the time and you go up to 650 or above and all of a sudden it jumps to 12 you know it's a 50% increase yeah in in penetrating you take something you know uh like the the tough head the original tough head true 3 to one uh High mechanical advantage and if you're you know below threshold but still you got to have decent mass and say you're shooting upper 500s uh heavy bone you've got better than a 50% chance that you're still going to break it but when you get up to that 650 that jumps 100% it's a big jump yeah now that's on standard size big game and I'm talking about up to Moose size the standard most of the stuff we find here in the states yeah if you start looking at Kate Buffalo you know with a 5 in ball joint it's going to take more it it takes more but uh for any of your standard game that 600 grain or 650 grain threshold is really important and the last year I was able to test year I hurt my back um I I did quite a lot of of testing looking at at FOC and mechanical advantage revisiting uh and focused on FC's effect on the heavy bone threshold and it's none I built up Aras that were 630 grain that were 30% F full c 3 to1 mechanical advantage everything and they had a 50% breaching rate on Buffalo on heavy bone not not the balls going though uh because to Rob shot that Buffalo I didn't know that for sure that you could break a ball on K bu with an arrow had never tested uh but when I took that same ARA setup and went to 655 grain we're talking about a very slight change in weight yeah 25 GRE it went to 100% it's crazy so I know it makes a huge difference and and you know and it wasn't just once I did it with different different era setups and every one of them same thing very close you know shootting 25 30 grain matched eras just the weight distribution different both of them teamed and looked at every one of them and you have know it won't go through heavy bone depending on the Broadhead 30 40% 50% and you go up above that threshold 100% 100% 100% 100% and that was the same year I did all the testing on Buffalo with the uh 40 lb bear formul silver recurve target bow and I had Aras that were 25 26% FOC mid 700 grain weight uh shooting against matched eras that were normal FOC and the the lower ones would had I don't remember the exact average penetration but it was less than a double lung hit where the ones that were all these are above heavy bone threshold and and but the ones that were at the higher F SE all went to the opposite side of the chest wall and so rightman I knew that yes right ER now this is a taking a well-placed shot you know essentially broadside through the ribs and that's still close to an inch of bone through the rib uh a 40b a slow 40lb bow will kill Buffalo with the right ER set up and that's why we had confidence when when Rob was building up those erors for that that lady that shooting 40 8 lb recurve and she made her trip to Africa one AR on k Buffalo one AR on a giraffe 48 lb recur that's that's really kind of saying something yeah it is it's saying a lot yeah I don't think people understand the weight of of just that you know cuz everybody's like oh I've got I mean it's nice for the guys that have like those 30 plus inch you know draw L long it's free energy you know but you've got somebody that's like low I don't ask her erors were 25 26 something like that of course I only draw 27 and2 on a Long Boat on a hill style boat that flat grip and the fact that you shoot relaxed arm you don't try to straighten your arm shoot and arm that also is for movement because when you shoot around this way your draw length would lengthen yeah a little more bend on your arm you shoot this way it shortens it so if you're used to shooting with B arm you can push your arm out you end up with your same draw length let me ask you something here so I know like you what where would you consider your level of skill to be as like an Archer uh I joke about it a lot I I was never great but uh I could stay 20 yards I could stay inside a 3-in circle so and that's shooting from various positions every shot right different you being the kind of guy that's shot close to 2,000 animals and not being like the world's most premier Elite accurate Archer what do you attribute your your success with big game hunting well some some of you know as I concentrate on learning a lot of hunting skills to get me clo I operate I've came up with this philosophy of close enough to kill you determine where you can shoot close enough to kill you know the your group size that gives you your distance then you develop your hunting skills to get you close enough to the animal to kill so the whole philosophy is close enough to kill you don't have to be a perfect shot all you got to do is put it in the Boiler Room yeah you know you don't have to hit a quarter the animal's going to be moving anyway you it's going to be good for you sometimes it's not going to be good for you sometime but if you can stay in that kill zone and then learn to get your fat ass close enough to the animal to to that you're in your Kill Zone you're close enough to kill mhm what what would you say your average distance for like your shot taken on large game give us a range uh my my those last we already know your rhino was 7t yeah across those 627 kills uh when I averaged out the longest shot was at 42 yards and the average was 15.9 s yards and probably and you get this number from your the data in your from the data from the database and that's all kept in a separate database hunted animals test shots so entirely different database and I looked at it from the standpoint the reason I started developing it was in my real hunting situations am I seeing the results that the test shots predict yeah right and in actuality is slightly better than would be predicted by the test shots and to me that's great validity for the test shots absolutely and uh so you know it's you've got to correlate all these things and data is the only way you can do it and the only data that's valid is is to get up there in the real world you know it's course been in the Air Force as long as I was yet I planes and stuff come to mind but you know you you take Lo he Martin skunk work probably the finest engineers in the world in Aeronautics and they have every facility possible all the computer modeling uh access to to highspeed crowd computers uh they've got wind tunnels they've got everything and they design these planes and they do all this testing but at the end they got to put a man in it and put it in the air mhm to tested in a real environment and I've got a I don't want to tip my hand because I'm is coming up in one of my uh ramblings on on the newsletter but uh I wrote NASA and I asked them you know with with the cost of doing all the test flights they do and and considering the engineering that they have and so you why is it worthwhile to spend all these tax dollars doing these flights I look for it it's it's it is the real world testing but they they go into a little detail about it and uh it's essentially the same thing until you fly it in the real world and I make the analogy of these foam Shooters it's like taking your airplane and test flying it in the ocean it don't fly well in the ocean but you put it in the air it flies a whole lot better but still vertually every airplane that's been built they've made modifications to it after they put man fly or it's like trying to put a submarine in the air there's right the right tool for the right job so testing tanks underwater same difference some people yeah some people might choose a screwdriver to drive a nail I've seen it happen but a hammer is a whole lot better yeah I've seen him drive a lot of screws that way yeah he wouldn't use a hammer to drive the screw yeah that's real common in Africa thank you Ed oh most welcome yeah thank you a lot thank you

Channel: Ranch Fairy

Views: 11,817

Keywords: Hunting, fishing, hog hunting, pig hunting, outdoors, shooting, pig shot placement, shot placement, rifle, guns, bass, speckled trout, redfish, archery, bow hunting, bowhunting, bowhunting hogs, bowhunting pigs, mechanical broad heads, fixed blade broad heads, Ashby Bowhunting, high FOC, heavy arrows, single bevel, cut on contact, bowhunting deer, sharpening, lighted nocks, Ed Ashby, Dr Ed Ashby, Natal Study, Rhino Hunting, Rhino with a bow, Ashby Foundation

Id: UW8UBsvsmaA

Length: 72min 53sec (4373 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 30 2024