Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles 7x57 Mauser

That's the Ingwe Special and I was using/experimenting with a factory load, the Prvi Grom, loaded with their 158 grain bullet at (factory specs) 2461 fps. It's mostly a copper bullet with a very thin lead core. Below right is a picture of a bullet I fired into a stack of dry newspaper (Mule Deer's preferred test medium). The one on the left was a Hornady 139 grain Interlock fired into the same stack. Big difference.

Anyway, the pig took two shots to drop. I pulled the first shot, and the pig made his way into the palmetto thicket out of which you can see the drag marks. The second shot went just behind his ear.

I never got an accurate weight since, on the camp cleaning rack, he was too long to lift completely off the ground; but with his head and shoulder still on the ground, the scale registered over 280 pounds. So he probably weighed a touch over 300.

Notice one thing about him though: he'd been cut. Several years ago, the rancher trapped a bunch of piglets, cut them, then let them go. Another rancher on the other side of the highway is always doing the same thing, so I don't know if this pig was one of the original group or one that migrated from the other property, but seeing that he was cut, he went to the game processor. He is one of six or eight cut pigs I've taken in the past few years, three or four of which have come in at about the same size. When they don't have anything to do but eat, sleep, and hide, they can really get big. Cut or not, though, as far as the table is concerned, I'd still rather have something in the 50-75 pound range.