You are taking Ingwe much too literally.
Well...if its legal, and considered ethical for deer and antelope, how would it be for elk? Or maybe some of those exotics down in Texas?
There is a lot more that separates deer from elk. besides size....... Size is the lesser of them. To me cost is the biggest issue.
It costs me locally less than a "C" note to hunt deer and I get to kill two of them. Their numbers are high and a nuisance on the roads. This is not at all the case with elk where I hunt them. The absolute minimum cost to me to hunt elk is $2,000 and that's for a cow tag. Further the distance of shots taken while elk hunting is more than 250 yards. IMO that's beyond the range of the .223..
If one chooses to hunt elk with a .223 have at it.......it's your money...you bought the tag, paid the trespass fee, drove the 1,000 miles each way and it seems to me that it's YOUR call as to what cartridge to use.....bear in mind that bow hunting is also a favorite sport on that ranch....but we don't challenge the "ethics" of that use do we?
As to me the gun I used in 2017 for deer was a .264 Win Mag and the gun I used for elk hunting was a .300 H&H.....I consider that "using enough gun"!
I've given the issue of "ethics" a goodly amount of thought over the years and it always boils down to this....."ethics" is a criteria we impose upon ourselves.....If it's so important t will become law and be imposed on all of us.
Lets not impose our ethics on each other.....one might just decide that bow hunting is unethical.....
