To me, buckshot is problematic. Sometimes it'll work ok.......but in my humble experience it's really a better wounder than killer. I do stoke my old A/5 with the stuff, but the immediate followup round is always a slug. I have personally shot a buck at 40 or so yards dead on in the brisket & knocked him down, that deer got up and I again shot him in the right shoulder knocking him onto his left side. The thing then got up and was shot two more times by a friend that had only a .22 mag pump rifle. Sure, he died, but ONLY after running well over a hundred yards in very heavy oak scrub! And yeah, that buck was being run by dogs. Still I had trouble believing what I'd just seen
Again, I've personally known of one single pellet kills at fantastic ranges, but those are truly the exception to the rule.
Buck does NOT leave a very good, if any, blood trail even with solid body hits and I have never seen a single instance where full thru and thru penetration was achieved. As stated, in every instance I've dealt with the pellets were lodged against the off side skin.
Relative to that last, I well recall a homicide I investigated years back where in one sleaze bag killed the other. The weapon used was a sawed off single with a tube of approximately one foot in length. The shell was a plastic cased Remington 2&3/4 containing 00 buck. The victim was a skinny woman that might've weighed 90 pounds soaking wet. The gun was jammed into her lower chest just under her sternum and discharged at contact.......the angle was slightly upward and absolutely NONE of those pellets completely penetrated her body, NONE! That entire batch of pellets were lodged just under her skin between her shoulder blades! When we turned her body over it looked like marbles under her skin.
That last is subjective I know, but it truly reinforced my personal opinion that the stuff is truly best used as a very short range proposition.