Steve:
I trust that this finds you doing acceptably well on this last Sunday in July. My how another year seems to be speeding by.

In answer to your initial query, for the most part nowadays at our house we do use what would fall into the definition of a premium bullet when hunting deer at our place.

With apologies for repeating some information here, I'll quickly state that I'm blessed to have both of our girls hunt now and before they started, my good wife and late father hunted as well. That meant on a good year we got to do a fair bit of "bullet testing".

Since about 1989 or thereabout, we've cut our own game and helped friends cut theirs as well though somehow it never occurred to us to keep a tally on what was cut until 2000. Since then, we've passed 85 animals cut and wrapped in our garage - mostly whitetail and mule deer, with 2 sheep, 2� moose and at least a dozen black bears thrown in.

When processing an animal, it is most often very easy to see the effectiveness of the bullet used to kill it. That combined with the obligatory retelling of the story of the hunt lets the observant listener learn a thing or two about cartridges and bullets.

Then too, as Okanagan, Rick F and 7STW have mentioned, where we hunt we can and do carry tags for whitetail buck, mule deer buck, black bear, 6 point minimum bull elk, 2 point bull moose and this year wolf. If we were lucky enough to be drawn in a LEH hunt, there are mountain goats and California Bighorn within 20 minutes up the logging road behind our house.

Lastly, in the past 20 years there have been 3 grizzly bears shot in the area we hunt that were bothering the hunters enough to have that take place. As we've no season here, the shootings get thoroughly investigated after being reported and they all passed the process. So while we've not had a brush with grizzly bears in our back yard, it's not impossible to have happen.

The question often asked about now in the conversation is "what did our fathers or their fathers do without premium bullets?". While on the surface that might have some validity, upon some further consideration I'm not certain that it's not a moot point and at best leads to a bunch of unanswered questions.

These would include how many animals did Uncle Ferd lose because of faulty bullets? We don't know and most likely neither does Uncle Ferd. He'll tell you about the 7x7 bull elk he took a cut at on the Bull River back in '48, but nobody knows if he hit it, much less what the bullet did.

Then too, they might have used something like the old Kling Kor Dominion, which were highly thought of back in the day, as were the Peters Belted......so it would appear that even back in the day there was a segment of hunters that weren't altogether pleased with "regular" bullet performance.

The invention of the Nosler Partition and if I was to guess, the RWS H-Mantle stemmed from someone being unsatisfied with the performance of a regular cup and core.

So what we've seen with deer carcasses has been that while the premium bullets might not kill deer any better and certainly no deader than a cup and core, the failure rate hasn't been any worse either.

Sometimes the cost of premium bullets comes into discussion as well, but I really can't see that as being an impediment to one either hunting that year or not.

I can't speak to the costs of hunting in any other part of the world, but for the girls and I to buy 3 BC hunting licences and tags will be right around $300. Decent hunting boots run well over $300 these days, at least Meindl or Kenetrek do out here. Most weekends we'll be able to put $100 worth of diesel into our pickup, while wearing out the $1200 tires and we've not even picked up some discount binoculars for the crew from Doug at Cameraland yet......so a couple of bullets that are $.30 more than a Core Lokt aren't going to keep us off the mountain.

Lastly, I'll end with these examples of "premium" bullets that did work extremely well on local deer. In fact based upon my experience I'd say much better than "regular" bullets would have given the shot placement and resulting tissue damage.

From the left .257" 80gr Barnes TTSX - lost less than 1 grain, .277" 130gr Hornady GMX - lost about a grain, .308" 168gr Barnes TSX - lost less than 1 grain.
[Linked Image]

None of the above is meant to imply that anyone else, anywhere or hunting anything should do what they do any differently. It's meant only to convey how our Okanagan family hunts and nothing more.

All the best in the upcoming week Steve.

Regards,
Dwayne






The most important stuff in life isn't "stuff"