Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Brown Bear with a 7 Rem Mag questions

I had a good friend who guided bear hunters here in Alaska for over 3 decades who was big on his recommendation of the 375. What I also noticed was that he seemed to book a lot of clients who didn't shoot their rifles very well ...and a surprising number of tales of guns which had obviously never been sighted in with live ammo. ("I had it bore-sighted by an 'expert'.")

That logic is so flawed I'm surprised you even posted it, given the other, generally sensible, things I've seen you say on here. Death is not quantifiable. While it is nice to save 17% on taxes, I've never walked up to an animal and been able to determine how much deader it would have been if I had used X cartridge instead.

When you are tracking something in long wet grass, the kind where you cannot see your feet when looking down, and it's currently raining. Would you like to see 17% more blood?

How about just seeing blood period, from a hole that is just barley big enough to provide this for you? Speaking for myself, I'll take all the blood flow I can get when looking for something this big with the potential to change your view forever on recreational sport hunting.

It's fine with me to see this differently, I lived through my careers in Alaska and Africa now doing this for a living. I've made some reasonable good choices to be able to continue doing this as well. People have their own opinions, However very few have lived through this process for over 30 years.

When you actually see one dead on the ground and are able to absorb the magnitude of what your seeing, then you lift up a front leg and see the paw and the claws, with the giant head laying there. That moment sticks with you forever. How you carry on with the career path and the choices you make, might not be the same as the moment before you had this experience!

Sorry, but gotta agree to disagree... too many every bit as knowledgeable have found it quite different. There is no magic in anything, especially big rifles handled by guys that have not shot them much.

I guided a couple Texans with 340Wbys many years ago when we stumbled into a grizzly of ordinary proportions and they both shot extremely well with their rifles and if that was the only marker in the trail you might assume it would be needed. Virtually all others with big rifles I saw screwed things up...

I have seen more brown/grizzly bears shot with smaller cartridges and none have gotten away... I used a 300WM for back-up for years. I have shot several with 375H&H and AI and will continue to... but not because it is any minimum.

JJ
When Riley shot his second brown bear with a 25-06 and 80gr bullets it left the most blood I have ever seen from any animal. One pool was over four feet in diameter and the rest of the blood trail was not really important because the bear was rolling down the mountain leaving plenty enough evidence.

And I automatically cede it was a bit of a stunt, at first. But he was very patient and when presented with the right shot he took it. As the bear was running his final streak he hit it again. Entrance and exits were so close you could easily put your fingers in the holes on each side.

Any rifle shot well is better than any shot poorly.

This line of argument assumes, for example, that a 175 7mm bullet running at 2800 fps muzzle velocity will expand, penetrate, and leave a hole an equivalent percentage smaller than a 200 grain 30 caliber bullet running some 200 fps slower.

A more likely scenario as it relates to this thread would pose the question: "Would you rather look for a small quantity of blood over short distance, or a perhaps larger quantity of stomach content over a longer distance?" (I never have been very convinced that looking for blood in open tundra had much value, bent and pressed materials being somewhat more useful sometimes. YMMV.) What isn't subject to YMMV is the fact that good shot placement trumps marginal shot placement, the weight and diameter of the appropriate projectiles notwithstanding.

This is the same bear I posted with me wearing my infamous blue Patagonia underwear ( I worked up a sweat playing cat and mouse with him in the pucker brush) He had been wounded and charged from under 20 feet when I finally caught up with him. And the 30-06 obviously worked


And the comment about many guides not being gun people is quite true. Most "learn" from the guide they apprenticed under and, like so many here, when they see a bear get away wounded come to the conclusion that a bigger rifle is needed or that the bullet was at fault. There is a Master guide in Alaska, who has even won the Weartherby award, who claims that a 375 is required even for black bears

One of my favorite Finn Aagaard stories is when one of my clients came back to camp after loosing a bear and claiming that he had hit it "on the point of the shoulder" with his 338 and 250 gr Partitions. Finn commented that he was sorry that the hunter had lost the bear but that if he had actually hit it on the shoulder with a 250 gr Partition that it wouldn't have been lost!

How my coffee missed the screen is an amazing thing! My tax forms were not so lucky! Obviously I was shooting a bore bigger than I can handle!

You're still making false arguments.

17% more blood? As a constant? No way.

I've never shot a brown bear, I'll give you that. But I've killed enough elk to know that sometimes you get blood, sometimes you don't.

I killed a cow a couple years back that ran a good 50 years without spilling a drop of blood. I know because I tracked her through the snow. Rifle was a 300 WBY, bullet was one of your beloved Barnes. Bullet hit the top of the heart and exited accordingly.

A few years before that, I knocked one over just across the drainage. Used a 7STW and got both lungs. That one left a blood trail.

But by your math, elk #1 should have bled more.

Tenacious, ain't ya?

They call me the bulldog. Better watch out, bro!

Actually I should have phrased that differently. I watched the elk drop and walked right to her. Then I back tracked her looking to see what things looked like. I was surprised not to find any blood at all.

I'm no bear hunter, but I know this much. 17% of $1,000,000 is a sizeable sum of money But 17% of $1 isn't enough to worry about. The difference between 25 caliber and 35 caliber just isn't that great. I don't see how the difference between 28 and 30 caliber can make a bit of difference. 17% of next to nothing is still not much.

Yeah, quite a few times I've held a .284 and .308 cal bullets side-by-side and wondered what all the fuss was about, and how any animal could ever tell the difference between the two.

So the 358Norma is now too much?

You trailed it for 50 years?

BearStalker, your math situation is in error, you're modifying the control number not the percentage

17% is the same amount regardless if it's $1.00 or $1,000,000, it's still 17%...... The Amount itself is 17%!

The totals per one dollar or one million are far different, however it's an incorrect analogy in itself used this way.
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Someplace in most critical applications of things there is a minimum accepted amount for nearly all engineering practices. Regardless if it's electrical, cement structures, Jet engine thrust, plumbing, mixing of fuels, carpentry, there are minimum standards for serious applications.

If 338 is about as good as 375HH, then really a 300 win mag is about as good as a 338...... right? then a 30/06 is darn close to the 300 win mag, so that should mean a 270 is about the same as the 30/06 according to most fans of that cartridge. Well then it stands to reason that a 25/06 should be about as good as a 270..... making the 243 a near equal to the 25/06, so that should mean that a .223 can be loaded to get pretty close to the 243, etc etc. etc. By this measure a .223 will kill a brown bear because there is no functional line in the sand for a base line of lethal function.

Someplace there should be a point of no return. Sure as Art pointed out that he saw a 25/06 kill a brown bear and with substantial blood to boot. As Well, Bell used a 7mm to shoot elephants( another story with an important reason that is always left out)

As a logical, thoughtful, responsible group of guys that we are. Without going down the path of argumentative one ups-manship that befalls this forum so often. Wouldn't if be a prudent observation to think logically about where that line in the sand is at?

It seems to me that every guy has his favorite cartridge or rifle, and wants to justify it's use on one of, if not the most deadly creatures on earth. This has already been done in countries with far more species of dangerous game then Alaska. Regardless of the choice or if it's right or wrong, these third world countries have at least come together as a group of responsible folks and created a minimum to set some type of standard.

I never really cared about what cartridge a hunter brought with him when I was a guide there. I was too young and stupid to consider the possibilities. As I matured, I began getting on the target to back up the shots nearly instantly as problems might present themselves.

The topic is further confused by folks that have never engaged in this. As I wrote earlier, when you walk up to a bear like this, and see it laying there dead. You hit an emotional point that leaves you breathless and in absolute awe of the moment. I've never had a hunter with me in this type of setting that felt he had enough gun. Not a single time! The great majority of my hunters would make a comment at some point regarding the massive size of the bear, and the puny nature of the gun used. ( regardless of the cartridge).

This is just as common and nearly an identical situation when an elephant, rhino, hippo, big croc, or buffalo, etc are killed. There is an awe "moment" that leaves the hunter breathless, it's as if they re having an out of body experience for that instant.

Still in the safe waiting for a return trip to Kodiak. It's the whole tag thing that doesn't want to cooperate!

JJ...

to get back where this started. It's not really about where the line is, but about what is best in a particular scenario...



Certainly very few people who have killed bears would quibble with whether a good bullet from a 7 Mag in the hands of a person who is both familiar with and confident in said rifle could be improved upon by bringing a new rifle into the equation. I don't think anyone is arguing that a 7 Mag is the equal of a 416 Mag. Certainly, a good 7 mm bullet placed well in a bear would be hard to better with an unfamiliar rifle. I think the "too big and unfamiliar" scenario has been played out enough times in various camps to think otherwise.

When it comes to this discussion of 30 caliber being "more" of everything than 7mm and smaller stuff, I'm going to string along with JJ Hack,since i assume that's where he was headed without saying exactly so.

I did not have time to read everything in the thread.


I like and use 7mm's but think the reason they perform well is that the heavier bullet weights creep squarely into the middle 30 caliber range. You may end up with dead stuff with either but side by side and shot into enough animals, i think that a 30 caliber magnum with a 200 gr bullet is more gun than a 7mm shooting a 160 to 175 gr. Shoot enough animals with both and you will see more damage from the 30's,assuming bullet structure is the same. It simply has the advantage in bullet weight and expanded frontal area(cross section of expanded bullets).


I had some knowledgeable and very experienced trophy elk hunters tell me this back in the 1980's and made the observations many times myself using 300's on elk sized animals.

With heavy 30 caliber bullets at magnum velocities,these guys felt the 30 caliber magnums broke up heavy bone,penetrated more reliably,destroyed more tissue.

This does not mean I doubt the capabilities of 7mm magnums with good heavy bullets,since they work too, but I simply think the 30 caliber magnums with good 180-200 gr bullets are "more gun" based on what I've seen,assuming equally good bullets.

Oops! Typo. Yards. Dang autocorrect.