I will say this, I don't think that well-heeled sportsmen hunting in Africa are necessarily a good representation of the typical American hunter. Maybe it is just a regional thing but virtually every hunter I know practices for a 300-400 yd shot and expects to have to take one. You can usually get closer but for someone to blatantly state that it is unethical to shoot beyond 350 yards turns me off. Maybe shooting elephants and buffalo beyond 350 yards is unethical but where do we draw the line? Is it unethical to shoot an unwounded woodchuck at 500 yards? Maybe African game is afforded higher life status than American game.
I don't doubt that many shooters show up over gunned and under practiced however.
You know being a unrepentant groundhog hunter in my past I have wondered why I consider long range sniping at a groundhog sporting but not so much with big game. I finally rationalized that it had to do with the bullet vs the body weight of the animal. In other words even using a small cartridge like a 222 I was using a 50gr. bullet at 3000 fps on a 12 lb. animal. that's a bullet/body weight ration of about 1:1700 ie. even a marginal gut shot on a ground hog is pretty fatal. So to create the same ratio on a 150lb deer you would have to shoot a 650gr bullet at 3000fps and for a 600 lb elk you would need a 2500gr bullet at 3000 fps. So basically that's the reason I am not sure about the woodchuck analogy. Basically I discourage the ultra long range shooting simply because it inflates the margin of error on first shot bullet placement just like shooting at running game does.
