Culling pigs in Calif with a .35 Whelen I have had plenty of body length exits but two stand out as memorable.
First was a 280gr Swift Aframe at 2300fps. I was crawling through a tunnel on my hands and knees when I ran into a boar at bayonet range. I tried to get out of the way and my shot actually angled up into the pig. The shot went between his teeth right under his nose and exited right over the top of his tail. It took out almost a foot of vertabra and needless to say it dropped in its tracks. The pig went 347lb gutted so Im estimating about 400-420 live weight. Bullet penetrated about 64" from teeth to tail. I have actually quit using the Swift due to a lack of expansion on most shots but have kept the last ones for wading into the brush following up wounded pigs.
Second was also the Whelen using a 250Gr Hornady at 2500fps. Another large pig (scale stopped at 300, guessing 350) was hit by friends 7mm Mag perfectly in the chest and choose to ignore it. As Mr. Piggy was going straight away I gave him one in the seat of the pants that destroyed the left femur and exited out the right side of his chest between the shoulder and neck, missing any additional bone. The hit on the leg bone left lead fragments weighing 60grs but the destruction through the chest was amazing. I imagine it wasnt a huge piece of bullet exiting but it gave everything it had. Penetration was about 53".
The 250 Hornady is my go to slug for culling and at one point I had almost 40 pigs without needing a second shot. On anything less than 300 pounds it exits most of the time on normal shots.
As expected based on construction, the two bullets behaved a bit differently but I was extremely pleased with the performance of both.
My 45LC is "in the mail" and I hope the local pigs will be sampling some hardcast LBTs in the near future.
Hunt hard, kill clean, waste nothing and offer no apologies.
"In rifle work, group size is of some interest...but it is well to remember that a rifleman does not shoot groups, he shoots shots." Jeff Cooper
| 
