Pattern your shot gun or guns

required lead changes with the angle of the shot, speed of the bird, speed of your load and of your swing and distance to the target.. No one set amount of lead is going to always work.

 

I've taken a lot more geese and turkeys with a 22lr rifle or pistol than I ever have with a shotgun. Smaller birds aint worth the shotshell and the noise if it's shtf and big birds can be taken at much longer ranges with the much less noisy 22lr rifle, without the bulk and weight of shotshells. This is especially true if you use match or subsonic 22le ammo.

Birds all land sometimes and the bigger the bird. the less flying it likes to do, typically. The shotgun is a joke for combat, 00 Buck and a riot barrel has head and shoulder sized holes in the pattern at a mere 35m, So a cover-user might not be hit at that range even tho you actually did have him centered in the pattern. Buckshot wont penetrate a car door or windshield beyond 10m of range or 5m if the angle of impact is not nearly 90 degrees. It wont shoot thru the tread of a steel belted radial tire, nor concealed armor Nobody's any good with $1 per shot deer slugs, If you were inclined to shoot the 5000 rds per year needed to do so, you'd need a new gun every year, and you'd be much more inclined to be shooting a suppressed autorifle. shooting 3-4x as much for the same money.

People don't favor shotguns cause they want precision hits. So their patterns are not going to be centered on the target. This is especially true if they lack a trigger job and luminous type rifle sights. So the guy often does not tkae a hit to the vitals at a mere 25m, and the 00 pellet out there hitting like a 38 special lrn, which is nothing much. You need multiple such hits to the vitals in order to get a reliable stop and that often means that you have to be 20m away or closer. A 20m head hit on a man is a 1 second flat snap shot with a 22lr rifle from port arms, and that hit is going to ruin his world. enough to let you easily walk up and finish him off.

 

If someone has bothered to do any testing a shot gun can be quite effective out to 40 yards. Of all the dozen or so deer I blasted with a shot gun when I lived in Maine only 2 were less than 20 yards, one of those I straight up shot in the face from close range, it looked like a mob hit. All the others were 30 to as much as 50 yards. Once the deer population increased enough to where they were consuming all the undergrowth and 50yards or more shots looked like they were going to become the norm instead of the exception I switched to 30-30.
No deer I shot ever got away after being shot once or twice by 00buck and as far as I could tell all 00 pellets passed through unless they cleverly hid in the skull or spine and went undetected.
I would fire, normally they would fall down and if they got up I blasted them again and they never got very far.
Now I'm in new Mexico and I'm lucky to get less than a 200 yard shot. During the plandemic and summer of peaceful but fiery protests I sold all my old buckshot and slug ammo that was 10 to 22 years old on gun broker. Actually I sold nearly all my factor loaded ammo I had on hand.

 

If I use 22lr I'm feedin that person to my dogs and they may or may not be all the way dead.