Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting looking for good .308 bullet for elk

Getting closer is the ideal but not always practical or even possible.

Most states, if not all, require expanding bullets for elk. A bullet that doesn�t expand may well fail to do the job even though it passes through the vitals. When I was first testing Barnes X bullets (160g in a 7mm RM) I found their performance to be very erratic. A coyote at 100 yards dropped instantly on a broadside to the chest yet I never found the entrance or exit holes. Then an antelope took two to the chest at a slight angle, range 300 yards. It stopped after the first and after the second laid down, head up high, as if sunning itself. Some 20 minutes later I had worked my way around the hill and had a ~75 yard shot. The antelope struggled to its feet and started to walk away at an angle. The third XLC hit a rib, messed up the heart and put the unfortunate critter out of its misery. The wound tracks for the first two bullets showed little or no sign of expansion. The third caused a lot more damage, whether because the bullet expanded or by flying rib fragments I can�t say. All bullets exited.

At one time I was experimenting using my .22-250 with FMJ�s on coyotes. Even with well-placed hits the results were far from satisfactory. As a result I went back to expanding bullets.

Even getting expanding bullets to the vitals with a well-placed hit can be problematic if the bullet is not suited to the task and impact velocity. I�ve seen the dust fly when an elk was hit broadside with a .243, only to have the elk lost after it wandered off. (In fact, I believe I�ve seen more elk wounded and lost to .243�s than with all other cartridges combined, which is one reason I have no interest in using them on elk.)

Then there is the problem of shots gone awry and situations where you must take a bad angle or let a possibly wounded elk get away. In those situations my preference is to have a bullet that will hold together, expand reliably and penetrate deeply. Bullets do not behave the same in these situations with some providing what I want much more reliably than others. Those are the kind that I take elk hunting. Light or thin-skinned cup-and-core bullets at high velocity need not apply.