Hi Josh

I agree with you. I do think the client that very seldom experience a charge should have a low power scope. Yours worked like a charm, and my personal favourite (if ever I can afford it , I will build another rifle especially for this scope), is the 1-6x42 Swarovski, with the illuminated reticle. However, the PH should carry open sights, it is faster, and works much better on charges (for me anyway.)

Just as you guys were going to the airport after your tour of our beautiful country (if I may say so myself), you might remember that I had a leopard charge. Now on this charge a few things went wrong. First, the cat did not want to bay with dogs. We had to get too close to try and get a shot at it before it injured the dogs too much. Second, that morning Gottfried (my driver) picked up my 9,3x64 instead of my .450 Rigby, which I am more used to and also has open sights which I prefer for all DG hunting, especially leopard over dogs (I only need to shoot if the brown stuff hits the fan.) Then, when this cat came, I/ the client shot it off centre in the chest/ in the front paw from close range, which slowed it down a bit, and after it jumped on Willem (one of the trackers), you can clearly see it did not have a lot of fight left in it, so it only chewed his left hjand, and scratched him on one of his legs, before he kicked him off, and Francois killed it. Now I firmly believed that if I had the .450 there, that cat was dead at our feet. Two hunts later, we had another charge by a leopard, and that cat folded with the .450, partly because of the bigger bullet, partly because of shotplacement, but mostly because I know my .450 so much better, and I shoot open sights with it exclusively.
I am off again tomorrow morning for a lion hunt, hope we do not need to practice this theory...!

(sorry of the video quality, we took it off the little screen of the camera with another one, as the cameraman (who I thinkl did extremely good), did not have a cable to download it.)

[Linked Image]

Ndumo Hunting Safaris