As I was drinking coffee this morning and surfing on my computer, a video appeared in my YouTube feed that discussed low recoil deer cartridges. Since I had replied to this thread earlier, I decided to watch it to see what this particular Africa-hunting vlogger had to say about the topic. As with anything involving subjective opinions, various decisions were made about measurement criteria (e.g. the round had to have a certain minimum speed to 500 yards, recoil speed in fps was given more weight than recoil energy in ft⋅lb, the Hornady H.I.T.S. formula, etc.). I would be stunned if everyone agreed with these choices. But as a person who likes math & quantifiable measurements when comparing things, I was curious to see how the final results aligned with my own opinions & biases.
For deer the results were (in descending order from #1): 6.5 Creedmoor .260 Remington 7x57mm Mauser 6.5-284 Norma 7mm-08 6.5 PRC .270 Winchester .264 Winchester Magnum .280 Remington .280 AI
This particular video discussed elk as the 2nd animal instead of bear, but here are the results anyway: 6.5 PRC .280 Remington .280 AI 6.5 Weatherby RPM 6.8 Western 7mm SAUM .30-06 Springfield .270 WSM 7mm WSM 7mm Rem Mag
As someone who crunches a lot of numbers in my work, I've always been fond of the quote “There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” by Benjamin Disraeli. Whenever you're looking at statistics it's always important to know who has their thumb on the scale and how that skews the results. For example, I think I could reload my earlier suggested 6.5x55 SE to match the output of the 6.5CM winner to get it to appear on the list. I'm also curious why #6, 9 & 10 from the deer list made the elk list but #7 & 8 did not. Why the gap? So there is definitely valid arguments that this list isn't definitive. It's simply another piece of info to integrate into the decision-making process or discard as you see fit.
