And I'd say guys who haven't seen mangled birds haven't seen enough birds.
For 20 years, until Iowa pheasant numbers started to decline significantly, I averaged 65 wild roosters/year. Hunting over dogs, I never felt that I needed the first barrel to be any tighter than IC.
Larry,
To your first point I'd respond that anybody who has seen more than a handful of mangled birds isn't exercising enough restraint. I don't shoot pheasants inside 25 yds, and locally that means a rooster getting up at 20 yds often has an opportunity to live another day. On my western hunts in open terrain I'd have considered it absolutely unjustifiable to shoot one inside 25 yds. Thus, while I've seen a very few pheasants mangled, I haven't done it myself. And every time I've witnessed it I've said to myself, and sometimes out loud, "Really? was that necessary?"
These many mangled pheasants you've seen, what choke under what conditions accounted for that? and do you believe the shooter error was one of choke selection and not poor judgement in taking the shot?
Regarding your second point; in killing these 1300 roosters where an IC would have sufficed, did you never see one "escape" with every indication of a clean miss only to fly several hundred yards and drop dead? I've seen it many times myself. I had the rare opportunity once to see a ruffed grouse "missed cleanly" then fly 300 yds and drop dead. Experiences like that taught me to question whether there was anything I could do to up my odds of making a clean kill. Things like picking my shots, chokes and ammunition to err on the side of a more-than-adequate shot pattern and practicing my wingshooting on ten or twenty thousand clay targets a year.
Seems we're prone to only count those birds brought to bag and that is somehow validation for whatever was used. If it involved a cylinder choke and a good dog running down a cripple...well, I guess some people count that a success. To me it's an embarassment.
