Originally Posted by Buzz
"4’s seem like serious medicine for wild pheasants….9’s are a joke."

I experimented with 4 shot on a dove shoot years and years ago; they worked very well, zero cripples.
And although I no longer suggest using #9 shot for hunting anything, I don't see #9 shot as a "joke" either based on lots of experience; and I'll relate a couple of instances from the misspent days of my youth. The first was a crow. I was walking a tree line when I heard a calling crow flying in my direction; I stopped and listened, and the crow crossed the tree line about 25-30 yards almost directly overhead. I shot quickly and the crow never slowed, but then I saw a dangling leg. As I watched, the crow flew another 30 yards or so and folded like a rock; it was dead in mid-air, just took the bird 3-4 seconds to come to that realization.
On another occasion while dove hunting on an extremely slow day, I watched several buzzards slowly circling overhead as buzzards are prone to do. Bored ad nauseum and wanting to shoot my gun, I'm thinking if that buzzard comes much closer I'm going to salute him with my 12-bore; so the bird got closer and I saluted with one of my 700X powered #9 reloads. To my utter shock and amazement, the buzzard folded like a stone and fell directly towards my blind; and exiting my blind that afternoon was the fastest I've ever moved! Perhaps one of those tiny pellets brained that buzzard (?); but it couldn't have been killed any deader than if it'd been hit with a load of BB shot.
Again, and now much older and wiser, I don't advocate #9 shot for game birds; but there are gunners who prefer doing so and they do so because they believe in the success they've enjoyed using #9 shot. Clearly most posters here believe game shooting with #9 shot is unethical, and perhaps it is; but unethical or not it is legal, and will remain so until game laws are changed.

And let me also say that I fully understand and appreciate Brother Stan's attitude towards #9 shot, but I also want to point out the differences in the Georgia dove fields each of us shot/shoot over. My hunting areas were confined to N.E. Georgia, the Piedmont region of the state and an area replete with rolling hills; which geography limited the size of tillable areas, so dove fields were typically small consisting of 2-5 acres. The result was that most shots were 30 yards or less. In the South GA Coastal plains region of the state where Stan does most of his dove shooting farming is huge; fields are flat and some stretch as far as one can see. The result is that dove fields often consist of dozens and hundreds of acres. I've never had the opportunity to hunt a South GA field but folks I know who have reported that it took quite a few hunters just to keep the birds moving, and that shot opportunities were often at longer ranges. So clearly Stan prefers a larger shot size; and even when I was young and stupid I'd have had enough sense to use larger shot under those conditions.