A meat shoot is a type of shooting sport similar to block shoots, ham shoots, and

turkey shoot A turkey shoot is an opportunity for an individual or a party to take advantage of a situation with a significant degree of ease. The term likely originates from a method of hunting wild turkeys in which the hunter, coming upon a flock, intention ...

s. They are typically run as fundraising events by small rod and gun clubs, gun owners associations, or

Veterans of Foreign Wars The Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), formally the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States, is an organization of US war veterans, who, as military service members fought in wars, campaigns, and expeditions on foreign land, waters, or ...

chapters. Rules vary by location, but the general idea is that using

shotgun A shotgun (also known as a scattergun, or historically as a fowling piece) is a long-barreled firearm designed to shoot a straight-walled cartridge known as a shotshell, which usually discharges numerous small pellet-like spherical sub- p ...

s or other small target-shooting weapons, participants shoot at paper targets to try to win prizes (often

ham Ham is pork from a leg cut that has been preserved by wet or dry curing, with or without smoking."Bacon: Bacon and Ham Curing" in ''Chambers's Encyclopædia''. London: George Newnes, 1961, Vol. 2, p. 39. As a processed meat, the term "ham ...

turkey Turkey ( tr, Türkiye ), officially the Republic of Türkiye ( tr, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, links=no ), is a list of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country located mainly on the Anatolia, Anatolian Peninsula in Western Asia, with ...

s, or select cuts of beef). Events usually include a numbered sign-up sheet on which shooters write their name to indicate for which prize they would like to compete. Different lines on the sheet correspond to different specific prizes (e.g., line No. 1 may be competing for a ham). Shooters can often buy as many chances to shoot as they would like. There are target cards numbered from 1 to 20 for each shoot. All targets are paper, all

shell Shell may refer to: Architecture and design * Shell (structure), a thin structure ** Concrete shell, a thin shell of concrete, usually with no interior columns or exterior buttresses ** Thin-shell structure Science Biology * Seashell, a hard o ...

s are light target loads, and both are provided by the club to maintain fairness. Each set of twenty targets is numbered to match the number of the corresponding sign-up sheet. The targets are hung out one at a time, and each shooter fires one shot at one target, in the numerical order of the sign-up sheet. The targets are inspected and measured by a judge with a

magnifying glass A magnifying glass is a convex lens that is used to produce a magnified image of an object. The lens is usually mounted in a frame with a handle. A magnifying glass can be used to focus light, such as to concentrate the sun's radiation to creat ...

, who sees only the numbered targets, from one shooter at a time, in order to preserve anonymity and prevent bias. The card with a hole closest to the ''X'' in the center of the target is the winner. It is irrelevant how many pellets hit the card; the one closest to center is the one that counts.

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Further reading