Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting 270 Win w/130 gr.

That's one of the dumbest things I read here. If you hit an elk in the guts with a 243, what do you have??? You haven't shot much have you??? You better just stick with golf or knitting...Some guys here can shoot big guns well. Just a thunk...:



If I were going to use my 270 on elk, I'd run the 150gr. Nosler partition....

The 270 or 7mm Rem Mag with 150g bullets is PLENTY of gun for elk, so long as you hit it in the boiler room. I've killed a CHIT pot of elk with both of those calibers over the years. Shot placement trumps caliber (within reason of course)� Oh, and my first elk as a wee teenager in 1982/83 (can't remember) WAS with a Ruger M77 tanger in .243 and 100g power points, a mature cow, and she didn't go very far� why? because I blew the top of her heart off.

I would use 140gr accubond in the 270 I seen the results of the accubond on moose so be my choice for elk as well. They also make a 130 accubond... My next choice would be 130gr barnes ttsx or tsx.

My buds daughter killed moose, caribou, black bear using a 243 using a 100gr nosler partition.

Jeez Shrapnel, why the hell did you never tell us that you came into life after your mom spent a nite at Elmer Keith's house?Jeez " Kirk Keith" what a mouthful, your definitely LEGENDARY now. Damn never would have guessed it. Magnum Man

Funny how women and kids can do it, but guys need big guns.

bsa1917hunter,

Please reread my post. I wrote that a .243 Win in the boiler room is a whole lot better than an '06 in the guts. Do you disagree?

I guess that elk must've taken to using steroids. Back before magnums were all the rage, hunters were killing everything with the 7x57, .303 British, .30-30 Win, '06, .45/70 Gov't, .405 WIn, etc. Not these cartridges won't work on jackrabbits.

When I was a teenager, my dad told me that there was a time when the .300 was the .300 Savage, which was plenty gun for really big critters.

Biology will always win. Nothing lives sans its heart. Period. End of story. What destroys it is immaterial. That it is destroyed is.

A confident hunter who puts a 100 grain .243 Win bullet through an elk's heart will kill it just as dead as were it shot with a super duper mega-magnum. After all, dead is dead.

What a hunter uses ain't nowhere near as important as his ability to use his rifle.

There's another sage old saying: the hunter who owns one rifle knows how to use it.

shoot them where they live and any thing from the 6mm up will get it done on elk, they are no harder to kill than any other animal if the bullet takes down the lungs. Poor shooting is what cripples big game animals not the cal of rifle you choose to use. .

Well said� this X2...

So, an elk is as easy to kill as a pronghorn?

Yes.

OK, so define "easy to kill."

If you hit an elk a little far back with a .30 caliber 165 grain bullet, crease the lungs and hit the liver, how far will it go before it dies, and how far would a similarly-hit pronghorn go?

Shoot either in the right place, they die promptly.

I've seen both elk and pronghorn go for miles and miles when shot poorly.

I don't think you answered my question, and I have seen double-lung shot elk (50 caliber bullet) go 200 yards. Never seen a pronghorn do that. Or heard of one doing it. Could be my inexperience with pronghorns.

I've seen pronghorn hit with high lung shots by bowhunters run a couple miles. I've seen pronghorn shot nicely through the lungs with Barnes bullets that didn't open travel a long damned ways. I've seen liver shot pronghorn go a long damned ways. I've seen gut shot pronghorn, and pronghorn with wounds to several extremities, keeping up with the herd, heading for science knows where.

Haven't been in on nearly as much elk killing, but have been in enough elk rodeos to know it's not something I want to repeat.

The wounded pronghorn were in open country, so they were often easier to find than a wounded elk. But that's an entirely different subject. Shoot something around the edges or blow a leg off and you're in for a rodeo. Put about any sort of decent bullet through the breathy/bleedy region, it's going to croak soon. This killing stuff just isn't that hard.

Never said it was, and never said you need a magnum or even an '06-based cartridge to kill an elk.

I just don't believe they're as easy to kill as a pronghorn.

Shoot them in the right place they die promptly. Shoot them in the wrong place they don't. Doesn't really matter what species we're talking about.

I wouldn't say that if one animal goes 100 yards after a shot, while another goes 50 yards that the 100 yarder was any harder to kill. These variables can be just as much about an individual's tenacity as any trait of the species. Very large animals may take a little longer to bleed out, but I wouldn't say that makes them tougher to kill.

Maybe not. But when I said I'd seen a double-lunged elk go 200 yards, it wasn't a Barnes that penciled through, it was a 350 grain soft lead bullet that went through the on-side clavicle, took out both lungs, expanded to the size of a quarter, and stopped under the off-side hide.

I would guess that a similarly-wounded pronghorn would not go far.

Out of curiosity, what led up to the shot on said elk?

IME elk that go far after good hits were usually "bumped" before the shot.