You're not being fair to Craig. He definitely used to be a magnum guy for elk and African plains game, but finally decided he needed to actually kill an elk with a .270 Winchester if he was going to keep talking about it. So he did, taking a .270 with handloaded 150-grain Nosler Partitions on a Whittington Center hunt for a big bull a while back. He made the longest shot he'd then taken on a mature bull, a little over 400 yards, and the bull also went down quicker than any bull he'd shot before.
After that he watched his daughter shoot a bunch of plains game successfully with a 7mm-08 Remington, and as a result of both experiences has modified his stance on magnums.
From what I have heard over the years, hunters tend to classify game as "tough" if it tends to travel a long way after imperfect hits. I would put both elk and pronghorn in that category.
Once in a great while any animal will decide not to die in the conventionally quick manner from a good hit. I've even seen that in animals other than pronghorn and elk, including mule deer--and once saw a springbok, an African gazelle about 3/4 the size of a pronghorn, go well over 100 yards with a chest-hole from a .375 H&H bullet you could stuff a football inside. But those are anomalies we simply can't explain.
But I will say that if pronghorns were the size of elk there'd be people advocating .375's for hunting 'em.
Try to find Boddington's article about specific cartridges for each species of North American game. Ask me & he destroyed his stature with that lunacy. But then again, gun/hunting magazines are entertainment. They are not professional journals.
If Boddington did finally come around to recognize that the .270 Win is wholly capable of killig elk, what took him so long to recognize the obvious?
