Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting Berger bullets for elk?

Gravestone,

Meat damage depends on where you put Bergers--but it's different than with other bullets. First, since they don't immediately start to expand, like every conventional hunting bullet. In fact the entrance hole is often so tiny you have to part the hair to find it, and the meat behind the hole isn't damaged, unlike conventional bullets where most shredded meat is right around the entrance.

The big damage occurs when the bullet expands after 2-3" of penetration, which normally means the innards get the worst of it--the reason Bergers kill so quickly. On smaller animals they often exit, and that's where the most meat damage can occur.

However, because Bergers do so much interior damage, I've found they kill just fine when placed a little further behind the shoulder than many of us place other bullets. If you keep 'em in the ribs, going and coming, meat damage is non-existent. A good example is the last animal I killed with a Berger VLD, a pronghorn buck taken with a 140-grain 6.5. He was almost broadside, just slightly quartering toward me, and I put the bullet a couple inches behind the shoulder. There was the typical knitting-needle hole there, and about a 1-1/2" exit hole in the middle of the ribs on the far side. The buck went about 10 yards, obviously dead on his feet. The inside of the chest looked like blood soup.

On bigger animals there often isn't enough left of the bullet to do any meat damage by the time they reach the far side. I shot a broadside red stag, weighing about 400 pounds, through the top of the top of the heart with a 168 from a .30-06. There was again the typical small hole through the meat of the shoulder, just behind the bone, but no exit. Fragments of the bullet pepper the inside of the far ribcage, but none penetrated the meat. The stag died right there, his heart literally turned inside out, into a loose flap of muscle.

I like that combination of quick-killing and minimal meat loss, but I've shot quite a few animals with VLD's and know how they work, so have faith in not having to put them through even the shoulder muscle for quick kills.