This time I'll add something relevant. I shot a good muley buck a few years back with my .375 H&H. Had decided to try the then-new 260 gr. Nosler B.T. I forget the exact yardage, something a little past 100 yards, or so. Broadside, no big bones hit, clean pass through and not one drop of blood spilled until a few feet of the downed buck. This after he ran up and out of the draw. Had I been hunting in the hills where things can be extremely thick, it would have been very tough to find this deer. In defense of my .375 I would say that this was a bit of a bullet mis-match, or was it? I might have had better or quicker results had I busted large bone.
Conversely, I've shot many deer, whitetails and muley with .223's and 6mm's. This before the age of "premiums". Ninety nine percent of them hit in the heart lung area and were literally bam-flops. I'm no expert now and was even further away from it at 12 and 13 years old. Yet never had trouble filling tags. 'Sticks ranking puts it about as simple as it can be put. Where people set themselves up for failure, as JJ and others have eluded to, is going into the field with an incomplete and/or faulty expectation/understanding of what pick-your-favorite-bullet will do when it impacts a game animal from whatever angle from whatever distance and whatever velocity having been shot from whatever cartridge/rifle/handgun combination. Increased understanding, however obtained, would result in less horror stories regardless of bullet diameter, fwiw. Good luck, Troy
