One of the interesting things about the myth of all African game being so much tougher than North American big game is that it's almost always heard from people without wide experience in North America, or even any experience--including a bunch of African PH's.
In fact I was taken to task by a well-known PH just last year, when I published an aritcle about the African toughness myth. This guy confronted me about the relative toughness of elk and blue wildebeest--but of course he'd never even seen an elk, much less seen an elk shot.
In contrast, I have killed all the supposedly super-tough plains game animals--zebra, wildebeest and gemsbok--as has my wife. I've also seen a bunch more taken by friends. Oddly, some of the quickest kills were made by Nosler Partitions put in the right place, even by such puny cartridges as the .270, 7x57 and .308--while some of the real rodeos were caused by super-bullets put in the wrong place with much bigger rounds.
In particular I remember a gemsbok one of my companions hit in the diaphragm on a broadside shot from a .375 H&H with a 270-grain Barnes TSX. The gemsbok went over two miles, and took several other "raking" shots from the .375 and the PH's .300 Winchester Magnum before succumbing.
If the same bullet had landed in the same place on a bull elk, the elk might never have been recovered, because of instead of running off over relatively level, semi-open thornveld, the elk would probably have gone over at least one mountain ridge, and maybe two or three.
Running off after hits around the edges is pretty much the definition of "tough." Elk are just as tough as any of the vaunted African plains game--but none of them are all that tough if hit right by a good bullet, even one of those antiquated Nosler Partitions.
