Geeze, first you have trouble killing with the .30-30, then the .25-06. It's not any shortcomings in the cartridges causing your problems, it's you.
Thanks for noticing. You can also add 35 Whelen in there as well. I'm pretty open about my failures. I retired my Whelenizer, however, not because I lost deer. It was that I was hitting deer and they were not going down any faster than those shot with my 30-06. I finally decided the 35 Whelen was not worth the extra effort and cost.
In the case of the 30-30 WIN, the turning point was
http://genesis9.angzva.com/?p=1388 To summarize, I was hunting with my new Marlin 336, and managed to send 3 rounds of 30 WCF into the chest of a 65 lb doe at under 30 yards, and she walked off like nothing had happened with the whole off side of her rib cage missing. Since that time my sons and I have used the rifle, albeit with a change in bullet, and had fairly good success.
This has been a painful process, but through it all I am happy to report a flawless record with 30-06 and the 308 WIN. I would also add that the failures have nearly all happened on freezer-filling expeditions and smaller doe. The larger bucks have all gone down smartly over the past 35 years. That in and of itself has me scratching my head.
I would also not want to hijack this thread with tails of my mishaps, except that it bears on the story of the .308 ME in one crucial aspect. While a lot of folks love the 30-30 WIN for what it can do, a lot of other folks are less than impressed. When I started hunting Kentucky in the late 80's, the woods on the Opener were filled with sounds of guys unloading the magazines of their 30-30's at fleeing deer. You can joke all you want, but the simple truth is that as the old guard has passed on and the new generation has taken to the woods, the overall number of shots has diminished greatly. The old geezers were mostly tied to their 30-30's and clung to them, because they afforded fast reloading. The new blood are using bolt guns with rounds that have more power than the 30 WCFs. The number of shot strings I hear on the Opener has gone down by a factor of 3 over the past decade, but the number of telechecked deer keeps rising. The new crowd doesn't need to reload. They're getting it done with one shot. Having been around these guys now for over 30 years, I can tell you Grandpa and Dad were not intrinsically bad shots. Something else was going wrong.
I am a hunter that shoots and not the other way around. I'm not a particularly bad shot, and I'm also not a rifle loony. I've played a lot at trying to discover what suits me the best, and had ups and downs along the way. So far, I can say that .308 caliber seems to do me the best for anything out to 250 yards. I can also say that I have the best luck overall with 150-165 grain non-premium bullets travelling at more than 2600 fps at the muzzle. I would also suggest that a lot of other fellows have gone down this road and come to similar conclusions, and the impetus for the .308 ME comes from that experience. The problem with the .308 ME was that it involved too many proprietary gimmicks to make it viable in the long run.
