When I was in Africa, my PH wanted a soft in the chamber and solids in the magazine. I've had many other people tell me that they were given the same instruction by their PH. This is the "old school" way of thinking, I suppose, prior to the advent of really tough softs, but this was in 2007 when we had good, premium bullets. In any case, my PH did not care at all what my thinking was regarding using all soft points. He didn't care if they were TSX's or North Fork cup points, or wax! It was a single soft point and then all solids, no debate allowed. He later told me that his thinking on this was you only get one real good shot opportunity, on the first shot. After that, it was usually a rodeo and a guy would be very lucky to get another shot into the same buff. And, if he did get a second shot into him, that he wanted to break the animal down right now, so if you had a hip shot or Texas heart shot, etc, that a solid had more of a chance of penetrating where it might do some actual damage and stop the animal. He admitted that there were instances where a buff, upon getting hit well, might just stand there or take a few steps and stop, and in that case, another soft would do just fine. But, he liked to error on the side of caution and have a better chance of stopping the buff right now with a solid.
I will say that at one point we were trailing a buff that we thought had a limp or damage to one of his hind legs. When we caught up with him, we could see that he had been caught in a poacher's snare and was wounded. The government game scout gave us the OK to shoot him and not count him on our license or quota. So, my PH had me unload the soft and put all solids in because he wanted the bull to go down right now. I shot him in the shoulder and down he went. When we got to him, bubbles from his lungs were coming out the entrance hole. I was quite impressed with the performance of a single solid on a buffalo. Knocked him down right now and he was dead before we got up to him. Of course, there were no other buffalo with this lone bull, so there was no worry about pass-throughs wounding another animal.
By the way, I think your friends idea of cycling all of his rounds through his rifle and then loading solids is pretty ridiculous. I would think a PH would think the same thing. I'd want to continue shooting with whatever bullet I had loaded before the animals are gone. Then, if you want, you can load more ammo of whatever bullet you desire. But to stand there cycling ammo without firing makes no sense to me.
