nighthawk,

Ah, another one of those famous "examples of one"....

An awful lot of hunters decide they know all about killing power after a few dozen animals, because each instance is magnified. But if you see a few hundred (or a few thousand) taken, you become aware that "killing power" (like anything that depends on numerous variables) follows a bell curve.

Anything can happen at the far ends of the curve, whether dropping an elephant with a .22 rimfire to having a whitetail doe run off quite a ways after a heart-lung shot from a perfectly adequate deer rifle.

One of my favorite examples of one was a springbok I shot during a cull hunt in South Africa almost a decade ago. I was testing the then-new (and short-lived) 260-grain .375 Nosler Ballistic Tip. It had worked very well up to that point, dropping various animals up to over 500 pounds quickly, and penetrating deeply.

A pair of springbok came trotting along, a male and female, pushed by drivers on horseback in the valley below. They didn't look all that alarmed, so I tracked them and when they stopped I shot the male (or "ram" as they're called). He dropped right there, as you might expect from an 80-pound animal shot with a .375 H&H.

The ewe ran a little way at the shot, then stopped to look back at where the ram dropped. At the shot she took off running again, going close to 100 yards before slowing and then falling. There was a hole on the other side of the chest you could stick the end of a football in.

From that experience we might extrapolate that the .375 H&H isn't really enough for antelope the size of Labrador retrievers, or that it was a really good thing when Nosler bonded the 260-grain Ballistic Tip less than a year later, because it wasn't tough enough. Instead, all it meant was that sometimes bullet diameter, expansion and velocity don't affect animals the way we theorize they should!


“Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans.”
John Steinbeck