Last Lemming,

Those two rifles will work fine--but as I have mentioned, some hunters start flinching when using a .300 magnum in Africa, even though they shot one well here. The reason is far more shooting--including a shot every day or two to check the zero, after bouncing around in a Toyota Land Cruiser.

Eileen planned to take blue wildebeest, zebra, and kudu on her first safari--though a kudu was a definite 3rd. Her primary big game rifle at the time was a .270 Winchester, and she'd heard African animals were very tough, so decided to take my NULA .30-06--despite having taken elk and moose handily with the .270. Back then (1999) Winchester Fail Safes were the most consistently accurate of the "petal" type bullets, so I worked up a load with 165s, which worked great on a big kudu and gemsbok (which she hadn't planned on, but there it was) on the first day of the safari. It was also worked great on a big blue wildebeest and red hartebeest a few days later. But by the time the shooting safari ended (we also spent some time touring afterward) she remarked that she could have done just as well with her .270 and the right bullets.

Her second safari took place in 2008, and by then she'd developed recoil headaches, so had switch from a NULA .270 to a custom .308 Winchester that weighed a little more. She use 150-grain Nosler E-Tips, which worked fine on a big zebra stallion, as well as several other animals--including a bushbuck where the bullet went through a Spanish prickly pear before it hit the buck. The bullet expanded before it hit the middle of the chest as the bushbuck faced her, yet still penetrated through the chest into the abdomen, dropping the buck right there.

Since then she's become ever more recoil sensitive, to the point where we switched to a 130 TTSX at about the same velocity as the 150 E-Tip, 2850 fps, and had a small muzzle brake put on the .308. It still kills bigger-than-deer game the same way, the last a cow elk that weighed close to 500 pounds. The cow stood quartering toward her at 250 yards, and the bullet broke the left front leg just above the big joint, ending up under the hide in the middle of the right ribs. The cow staggered 20-25 yards before it crumpled, obviously dead on its feet.

One of my companions on a 2007 safari killed a big bull gemsbok with the wimpy .270 Winchester and a 150-grain Partition, which like the blue wildebeest another guy took with the 140 AccuBond and a 7mm-08, went about 50 yards.

Have also seen plenty of those same animals go a LONG way after being shot in a slightly wrong spot with much larger cartridges. Perhaps the most extreme example was a gemsbok shot around the diaphragm (which isn't all that far back on gemsbok) with a .375 H&H and a 270-grain Barnes TSX. That involved a two-mile tracking job before he put another in the right place.
That contradicts the theory that a bigger magnum bullet helps when the shot isn't perfectly placed, but have seen too many similar incidents over the years involving "magnum" bullets that weren't placed very far off that also didn't kill well. One was a bull elk hit through the bottom of the heart with a 200-grain Partition from a .300 Weatherby Magnum. It would have died eventually, of course, but managed to go uphill for around 100 yards before another shot put it down.

Finn Aagaard once wrote that in his opinion a magnum MIGHT make a difference if a shot is off perhaps 2" from the ideal placement, but not otherwise. Some years after reading that, I tend to agree.

Am not saying you shouldn't take your .300, because it can be useful to take a second rifle. But the .30-06 with 168 TSXs is plenty for plains game.




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