And now the moral of the story..... sooner or later we just grab a gun and go hunting and quit picking the fly [bleep] out of the pepper!
What I find entertaining about the elk cartridge discussions is that we seem inclined to ignore the evidence that is right in front of our eyes.....we can see an elk killed very dead (or shoot it ourselves) with a 270,7/08,7RM,or 30/06 etc.,watch it die,and do this year after year,and lie awake nights pondering whether a 300 or 338 (or something bigger) would have killed it "better"...
So we go get something bigger,kill some more elk (which continue to die pretty much the same way),and if the elk take a few more steps when killed with the bigger stuff, we think nothing of it,smug in our view(notion) that the bigger rifle is "better"....passing off the reports of the guy who floored several with a 7x57 or 7 mag as "flukes".....
Another thing I've noticed we do is ignore all empirical data and information from the past,like it doesn't exist; the New Dawn of ballistic revelation and terminal effectivness resides with us! ...
We set aside from our minds the fact that things like the 30/06 and 270 have been killing elk sized critters for about 80-100 years,ignoring the experience of tens of thousands who came before us and killed elk by the truckloads......I suppose this is typical human arrogance that says ..."if it ain't invented here, it doesn't exist..."
You would think,over 100 years into the smokeless powder era, we'd have gotten over this stuff by now.
I doubt it's possible for anyone on here to kill enough elk in their lifetime with (say) a 300 mag, 338 win mag,and a 7RM (just as examples)to say for a certainty that one is significantly more lethal than another,given equally good bullets and proper placement.And I'm not talking 30,40-50 elk...I'm talking thousands).
I've seen elk hit around the fringes with all three and the only conclusion I came to was that the magical qualities of the larger cartridges in providing "insurance"(which I assume means the bigger cartridges help you recover the elk better with marginal hits).....was absent.
I have noticed that all three provide very fast kills from chest/shoulder hits.
But I'm not surprised by any of this.....because people have been doing exactly the same things with these cartridges(and others that are similar) for generations.
If I were a young,aspiring elk hunter today, I would worry little about the cartridges and worry more about getting to go elk hunting.....
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