Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Express Rifles and Big Bores Only .375" 300 Accubond and TSX on deer class game?

ShortRifle,

For over a decade through most of the '90s and into this century, I managed kill permits for deer which usually called for at least killing 30 deer over an extended time frame between September and June each year. During that time, I hunted with everything from selfbows thru rifles of many different chamberings.

Of everything I used, one rifle, in particular the cartridge, stood out as the most consistent DRT killer with the least amount of meat damage beyond all others. This being from a rifle that was not intended for deer that I originally took out on a few deer culls just to get trigger time prior to a hunt elsewhere for a big bear. I had built a 375H&H Mauser about as light as I could reasonably afford and it ended up about standard weight for a typical sporting rifle. My only intent was to get this thing out to see if anything broke and to get trigger time before my bear trip. Using full standard loads, this rifle compiled an impressive string of deer kills that spanned many years. I kept a journal with my farthest measured kill being just over 300 yards, my closest being point blank, and with numerous kills between. I've never experienced this level of performance with such minimal meat damage from any other cartridge used. I normally try to shoot through the lungs saving the heart for table fare, and no other cartridge I've used had the same level of DRT power on a thin skin deer while leaving the heart undamaged. Based on this experience, I�d recommend to keep things simple by using the same 260-300 grain bullets used on large game like elk and big bear loaded to standard H&H velocities. When I look at the 375Ruger, I do not think of it as a hyper velocity H&H, I think of it as a standard velocity full length barrel H&H from a short barreled Ruger.

My days of hunting big bears are probably over and the majority of my hunting today involves the long bow with the 30-06 being my go to for a big game rifle, and my 243 being my go to for a vermin rifle. Not sure I�ll ever pull out the lightweight 375 for deer again as it takes a bunch of trigger time for me to handle it as well as the 30-06. But if I did, I�d go back to the same load combinations used before.

As a postscript, If any of my load combinations resulted in a tendency for excessive meat damage and absolute devastation on deer and boar where I could easily put a baseball bat through from entrance to exit, I�d discard that combination. Based on my experience, this level of meat damage is unnecessary with the 375 for clean effective DRT kills. The heart is too large a chunk of good meat to waste with wanton destruction.


Here is a big Russian boar weighing over 300 pounds that I smoked with a 65pound Hill longbow using a single turkey feathered wood arrow with a heavy Grizzly 2-bladed broadhead. It does not take explosive internal meat damage with large amounts of bloodshot meat to kill an animal for the table.

Best:)