Just a head's up before you end up having to call on our resident tooth doc...
So, if you look at my spring trip thread, you will notice a dead pig. Upon cleaning that pig, it became obvious that my buddy actually did the fatal damage with his 410 and 9.5 tss. My 12 ga 3.5" copper plated 5s were tucked neatly under the skin and in the fat, but his little tss shot was scattered DEEP.
Fast forward to hanging with my buddies up on the Tugaloo river. My bud thawed out a turkey a friend had given him, and we started cutting it into strips to fry. As we cut, my bud said, "what is up with that?" I looked over, and the breast he was working on had about ten feather tips sticking out. We pulled each one out, and each had a piece of 9.5 tss shot tucked into the fold of the feather that was buried deep into the breast. After 45 minutes of cutting thinner and thinner strips and probing each piece very carefully, Will had extracted well over 20 tiny pieces of TSS and had found some in both breasts. I've never seen anyone work harder to try to remove shot from meat, and toward the end of eating the wonderful meal and long after we'd all let our down our guard, his wife found one he missed and promptly chipped a tooth.
After patterning my 410 at 30 yards, it became obvious that there was no way to shoot one with TSS beyond about 10 yards without some of the pattern getting into the meat. This has never been a problem with the turkey loads I use, as I will occasionally have that "tucked in" feather and may have a flyer or two that will just barely penetrate the breast meat, but with those stray copper plated lead pellets, they are easy to ID, locate, and remove, as the feathers severely slow the momentum and restrict the penetration. With the same density TSS shot being so dang small, they easily penetrate thru the feathers and deep into the meat, and from what we experienced, they will penetrate through the breast bone and into the other side. To make it worse, if they are not tucked into a feather pushed into the meat, they are damn near impossible to locate prior to cooking.
Not sure if you TSS killers have figured out an easy and safe way around this problem, but I figured I'd post this as a PSA before someone figures this out the hard way. Getting that turkey safe to eat was a similar experience to my first and only attempt at cleaning and eating a jackfish.
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