He was shooting a 7SAUM and was following up on the first shooter with a 308 and LRX. He called it from a seriously long distance and it took a couple hours to come to them. 54", but a "helicopter" shape. Very heavy mass both body and antlers, but likely a function of a truly great growing season. Guessing three-years-old. Hind quarters were still 130ish pounds after a long hanging.
Quartering on for the first shot at under 100 yards into shoulder, where it stayed. Second shot quartering away into ribs and the same shoulder where it stayed. Final finishing shot was in the neck at about 50 yards. It almost made it to bone. All three lost all petals and look to have tumbled. One was bent. Large mess in the shoulder and nothing more than ribs were hit for bone.
While cutting all three blue tips were found as well as most of the petals. Seriously wrong application for the bullet. I have no idea why they went that route. Sometimes he consults me, sometimes not so much.
Riley put a couple LR TXSs in a fair sized bull moose the other day and they were extremely underwhelming. They were up close and personal sort of shots and they came completely apart and penetration was non-existant. That was only 7mm (149gr?) but not close to acceptable and they did terrificly bad meat damage. Not to ever be considered again...
The solid copper bullets came apart? Yikes!
I think those are softer, designed to open at lower, LR velocities. They may be too soft for the above application, as evidenced by the reported terminal performance. I'd say there were better choices for that scenario.
DF
