MD,
If you were ever to hunt leopard. I know you said you have no desire, please humor me.
1. What would you use?
Probably whatever "light" rifle I'd brought--if I took more than one, which I generally do. (Though will also mention that I've used the .375 H&H as both my "light" and "heavy" rifle on safaris.)
The smallest chambering I've personally taken to Africa is the 7x57, which I used with a variety of bullets in the 160-grain range--mostly because the 7x57 I hunted with for years would put handloads using the same powder charge and bullets from 156 to 160 grains in the same group at 100 yards, which it wouldn't do with any other bullet weight, and I was always "field-testing" different bullets. It worked fine on plains game up to around 700 pounds, and would certainly kill a leopard cleanly.
But I would also happily use the .243 Winchester, and will tell a short story about its use in Africa. One of my fellow writers, Richard Mann, has also spent considerable time in Africa. Several years ago his wife Drema decided she wanted to start hunting, so Richard got her a .243, which would work well on the whitetails in their native West Virginia. She practiced a lot, but before deer season that year Richard ended up going to South Africa for plains-game hunt. He asked Drema if she'd like to go to Africa, and she said sure! The load he'd worked up used the 85-grain Nosler Partition, and she used it to take several animals, all with one shot. One was an impala, but the others included trophy gemsbok and blue wildebeest bulls.
