Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Mr Shoemaker- 300 Mag Bear Stopping Bullet?

Hello sir, I am curious as to what has worked the best (or you suggest for your hunters) in a 300 Win Mag ( or others) to stop or "help stop" an aggressive bear or one that charged? 200gr and up soft nose or big Mono? Thank you.

Anyone is welcome to chime in guys!

Phil is probably very busy guiding bear and moose hunters, but I know from our conversations that his penetration tests showed the 220-grain Nosler Partition penetrated deeper than any other .30 caliber bullet he tried--and that included a bunch. I also know that's the bullet he used when folowing up (and stopping) the last wounded brown bear he killed with a .30-06, a few years ago.

He carried the .30-06 because the client he guided shot very well during sight-in--and Phil liked the particular .30-06. Unfortunately, during the actual hunt, the client did not shoot well, and Phil had to follow up the bear (a big one, per usual in his guiding). The 220's worked fine, but Phil expressed some desire for his .458 afterwards.

North Fork...

I believe I will give 200 gr Speer HotCor a try in such an application.

Godogs and Pahntr,

Are your recommendations based on your experiences with those bullets on aggressive bears?

Of course not. This is the Campfire after all.

No mine is not, never had the experience. I will be moving to the last frontier next year and just may be in such a situation, I figure. I have seen how well Speer perform in various critters in my time in Utah, "punching above their weight" type comments are what I have heard/seen. It was just a suggestion after all.

He also speaks very highly of the 200 gr partition.

Forget the Speer although it would probably work fine go with a 200-220 Nosler, Woodleigh, North Fork, Kodiak, Swift, Trophy Bonded, or similar. When you are close enough to not only smell the bear but taste it in the back of your mouth nothing will feel adequate. The hair would always bristle on the back of my neck when I was close to big bears. When I was guiding (fly fishing) I carried a 7RM with 175 Noslers but I wished for a .375 several times. Fortunately I never had to use it even with bears as close as ten feet away. Just think about an animal that can take down a full grown moose, run faster than a horse, and has the intelligence close to a dogs, they are formidable.

In fact if bear are going to be more than an occasional thing I would recommend a good medium bore from 338 to 400 with the 375s being about ideal.

By African reckoning true "stopping" cartridges don't start til about .458 caliber.

I've been in three situations where bear have came after hunters and this is what I have to say about it! You better spend a lot more time practicing shooting offhand at targets than the effort you put into picking a bullet.

One situation was a Black bear that had been hit on the highway and when a friend jumped out to put it out of its misery the bear came after him. He shot the bear thru the lungs twice as it attempted to get him! Don't be stupid and shoot a bear thru the lungs because if you do your a dumbass! It doesn't kill them right away. In fact it angered the bear more and as it was going for him again only much more aggressively I dispatched of the bear with one shot behind the ear with a 12 gauge shotgun.

Second bear was with an older military friend Chuck who had served in the special forces and a fella named Steve Hodgdon who is related to the family who makes hodgdon gun powder. Both men were experienced hunters however when we went into the brush after a Black bear that had been shot thru both front shoulders the bear was still alive and extremely aggressive when we walked up on him. The bear couldn't move very well because both front shoulders had been shattered but it was very much alive and very much in a rage. At this point both Chuck and Steve emptied a 45 and a 357 mag at the bear. When the bear continued to aggress I shot the bear in the head with a 270 and it immediately stopped moving. The problem this time had been that both Chuck and Steve although rather experienced admitted to not having practiced much at all in there later years. Apon inspection we did find one 38 caliber bullet hole thru the ear! 11 shots were fired at about 10 feet away. There pistols were emptied what if the bear could move a bit better and what if I hadn't been there. The moral is if you want to hunt bear don't rely on the fact that you used to shoot a lot years ago!

Third bear another black bear was caused by a Rottweiler taking after it, pissing the bear off, and than running back behind me and my brother! In this instance the younger brother put one shot thru the head of the bear at less than 10 feet with his 44 mag and dropped it in its tracks! I was very thankful that day that the thousands of rounds of practice and playing with pistols paid off and was thankful he was packing.

Every year hunters are killed by bears and while I haven't encountered a grizzly I hear they are more dangerous and agressive than black bear which in my experience are very dangerous. Many of those hunters are carrying ammo with a bullet that could easily kill a bear had the hunter been prepared and practiced! I won't hunt bear without making damn sure I can shoot and am ready because IME it can mean your life and not just from what most people get all giddy about......"the big browns" The determining factor that killed all three of these bears I have talked about was not the size of the weapon it was simply shooting the bear in the CNS, the head in these three instances, and hitting where the shot was intended to hit.

Your mileage may vary but this is the experiences I have had with bears so thought I would relate them

I'm a huge TSX/TTSX fan and I would use them more heavier than 180 grain

Thanks guys. I figure it would have to be big enough to hold together, as hitting the body , maybe breaking it down, is going to be more likely than a head shot. I'm in agreement with being a practiced shot, and I too don't trust a black bear ( the ones where I hunt are usually sows with cubs) at all. Its a big area that ranchers use for calving, so lots of predators around, from bobcat to teeth popping mama bears! ha

Trystan - good stories/examples - yup it's pretty easy to wind up too doggone close to a bear! I like your emphasis on quick marksmanship rather than on a particular cartridge/bullet combo.

Regards, Guy

I'm going after a large (for this area) Black Bear this year. No guiding or anything, but I am trusting the 180 TTSX to do the job. I carry Barnes TAC-XP in my pistols exclusively, but never tried their rifle bullets. I'm usually a Partition user, but I really want to try the monos. This bear is 300-350 lbs, and has wreaked havoc on apple and peach tree around here. Even took out a few stands of bees. I look forward to testing the Barnes.

It was a solicitation for opinions so I responded. I use NF's on Elk and have had excellent results every time. They smash through tough shoulders and do a wonderful job with respect to terminal performance. I figured their excellent reputation was well known. For the record...a few of the elk were aggressive if that matters.

No personal experience. But there have been many people who have conducted these tests and they all came to the same conclusion. I've read comments by Phil Shoemaker here and read a good article by Finn Aagaard related to his bullet testing on African game. There used to be a good article online conducted by the Alaska F&G concerning their recommendation for large bear protection that I can no longer find. The 200 or 220 gr Partition in either 30-06 or 300 magnum gave the deepest penetration of any 30 caliber tested.

Aagaard and the Alaska F&G also tested many other cartridges. The 30-06 and 300 mag with those bullets tied in penetration and beat every other bullet and cartridge tested smaller than 375 mag. That included 338 WM, 35 Whelen, and 45-70. The Alaska F&G study recommended 30-06 with 200 or 220 gr bullets as the best choice for most people for bear defense. The 375 and larger magnum cartridges beat 30-06, but they felt the recoil could be an issue for some people and they felt the 30-06 was adequate.

Another reason to shoot the gun you hunt with. A lot.

375 recoil is only bad in a poorly designed rifle or if you haven’t shot it a lot.

You need to learn how. By doing it.

Worth repeating!

Bullet placement in that situation is going to matter way more than the actual bullet used.

It would be great if Phil actually had the time to respond here, but as I noted earlier this is the Alaskan bear season and he's out there, beyond the reach of the Internet, dealing with some of the biggest bears on earth.

I hesitate to put words in his mouth, but we've talked about this a lot--partly because Eileen and I have spent time up there with him, fishing and hunting birds during the peak of the salmon spawning season, when his part of the Alaskan Peninsula has (according to biologists) the highest concentration of brown bears in Alaska. In fact, we had some interesting encounters with brown bears during our time together--as have I with both browns and grizzlies elsewhere.

Based on all that, I suspect he would comment that those who suggest certain "stopping" bullets (and cartridges) for bears are FOS.

Or at the very least, have limited experence.

No more than one can handle........well

I bet most folks, having to deal with dangerous bears are NOT FOS afterward! ha

I do not know if the study was pulled or not, but it is very dated. Many bullets in common use today were simply not available when those tests were run.

Great post Trystan. Thanks for sharing this good first hand info. Question about the .270 though. Was it scoped? At what range did you shoot the bear in the head?

Having once killed a pig at a range of eight feet with a scoped .30-'06 I will admit to not having seen the pig very well.

The only live grizzly I've seen was on a video done by a family friend. My wife and a lady friend were travelling in Western Canada by rental car to visit family members and saw many black bears. But there was this one occasion where they came across a silver tip grizzly sitting on its rump eating roots it had just dug from the ground. The lady friend wanted my wife to stop the car -- which she did -- she got out and onto the side of the ridge with the bear and videoed it from about twenty yards for 10 - 15 minutes. It was a beautiful bear that when finished eating it got up and walked on all fours away from the camera and disappeared into the bush.

My personal experience with bears are many as I've hunted them every season for thirty years, and probably taken my share. I wounded a couple over that period and had to do a follow-up -- but with two partners the following day on the first incident, and a single partner on the second incident with a decade in between. Both bears did the exact same thing: they spent the night in very thick bush with an open area within of about 30 to 50 sq-ft where they laid down watching their back trail. I personally discovered their hideaways with a patch of blood on the grass where they laid about the size of dinner plates. I carried a .45-70 with a bear load, but they each had left the scenes before we arrived and we never caught up with them. Both were wounded with .35-caliber rifles, a Whelen and a Rem Mag.

In my experience of killing bears with a single shot, none were CNS hits... and I've killed several this way: with a single heavy for caliber .458" through lungs, or lungs/heart. They dropped to the shot and never got up from that. Those were mostly from .45-70s and a few from .458 Win Mags. Yes, I've killed others using mid-bores, including the .35 Whelen and 9.3 x 62, but they all ran about 20 - 25 yards before dropping dead. Where I've hunted, 20 - 25 yards can mean over a cliff or down in a troublesome ravine, or worse -- into a swamp or bog.

Bob

www.bigbores.ca

Good signature line......

Why not just use a 180 NP or 180 TSX, and know where it hit his at 15-20 yards.

i have a friend who has killed many bears in Alaska and some out west too he liked a 338 Win. Mag. much better for bears that charged him ,so he just always hunted with a 338 Win. Mag. he has had plenty combat experience too frontline wounded Viet Nam Marine vet. so a single animal running at him is easier .

The 270 was scoped with a leupold 6X42 but I didn't use the scope. I was several feet from the bear when I pulled the trigger. The brush was thick and I had taken a different line thru the brush than Chuck and Steve so was slightly off to the side. As the bear lunged toward Chuck and Steve he landed in the brush right next to me. I stuck my barrel thru the brush less than a foot from the bears head and pulled the trigger.

If memory serves, Phil Shoemaker said in one of his articles that the first stopping rifle he used was a 30-06 loaded with 200 grain Partitions.

Pahntr

Some here really like the Speer H C.

I want to honestly & sincerely encourage you to TEST the 200 gr HC
BEFORE you encounter any and ESPECIALLY an aggressive bear.

Your BACON depends on the bullet you choose.

I would NOT bet MY bacon on ANY cup/core bullet vs an angry bear.
Bullets are cheap >> maulings >> maimings >> hospitals >> funerals are NOT.

Good luck

Jerry

Jerseyboy,

Actually, I doubt if Phil used the words "stopping rifle" but yes, he did start out as a brown bear guide with a .30-06 and 200-grain Partitions many years ago, because that was the rifle he had, and 200-grain Partition were, at the time, probably the deepest penetrating .30 caliber bullet.

The combination kept bears off him, but there were too many adventures involved, the reason Phil eventually bought the Mark X Mauser .458 Winchester Magnum that he turned into Old Ugly. It is still his favorite stopping rifle, despite him having used a bunch of other rifles and rounds, because it provides the right amount of power in a comparatively lightweight rifle.

Aside from reading Phil's writings (I have even published some in both magazines and on the Internet) one point he made was that the advantage of a "stopping rifle" wasn't that the cartridge was powerful enough to always stop, finally and forever, a charging brown bear with one shot. He has apparently never found such a round, despite experimenting for decades with cartridges up to and including the .505 Gibbs.

Instead what he found was that larger cartridges would often stop (or even drop) charging bears at least momentarily, even if the hit wasn't instantly fatal, providing time to get in another shot--often on a stunned and stationary bear, rather than a bear often running through thick brush. That was the flaw with the .505: While it stopped bears even with non-fatal hits, the heavy recoil made follow-up shots slower. All of which is why Old Ugly is still his favorite--and the rifle he took to Africa recently on his first Cape buffalo hunt.

He does prefer bullets that penetrate well, even at odd angles and through heavy bones, because you can't always count on a central nervous system hit on charging bears, especially in brush. Which is why he has experimented considerably with bullet penetration, once even on a dead whale that washed up on a nearby beach. During those experiments he found the 220-grain Nosler Partition penetrated deeper than any other .30 caliber bullet he tried, including monolithics. There's no doubt he would have used the 220 when he started in preference to the 200-grain Partition--but the 220 did not exist then. He did use 220 a few years ago when, for various reasons, he again ended up going after a wounded brown bear with a .30-06. It worked--but not like Old Ugly.

This sounds like Mr. Shoemakers version of Taylors KO theory. Nothing wrong with the theory it just doesn't equate to a mathematical formula very well and like any other theory it is just a general rule.

Taylor's KO numbers were supposedly based on the time an elephant remained "knocked out" by a bullet that narrowly missed the brain, though plenty of African PH's say they've found it to be BS.

Taylor also did not state in his most popular book, AFRICAN RIFLES AND CARTRIDGES, that his KO notion was based on solid, "bluff-nosed" bullets and heavy, thick-skinned game. His slightly earlier book BIG GAME AND BIG GAME RIFLES, also published in 1948, makes this point plainly. Despite that, many hunters somehow apply KO to all hunting cartridges and expanding bullets.

Phil's conclusions are not theories, but based on long experience with a wide variety of cartridges for stopping brown bears, using cartridges from the 9mm Parabellum to the .505 Gibbs. He did not try to convert them to a formula, as Taylor did. I've always wondered how many "knocked-out" elephants Taylor timed to see how long they took to wake up....

Talking about Knock Out.....John Buhmiller would load the first round base forward......
Wouldn’t feed from Magazine that way.....but gave him maybe 15 seconds while the elephant was stunned. He shot 155 and tested a lot of guns and cartridges. He necked up the 378 Weatherby to 45.......didn’t use it as the larger base gave him one fewer in the magazine.

These questions always seem to tie me up in knots. Should I go into the mountains with a rifle set up for hunting elk out to 400 yards or a rifle set up for stopping an aggressive bear at 10 feet?

One solution I've come up with is hunt with a partner. One of you carries the scoped elk rifle. The other carries an iron-sighted .458 with whatever bullet Phil Shoemaker uses. And you switch when the first guy gets his elk.

Not a bear guide, and never shot a bear either, that said, were I too take one of my 300 mags for big bear, they'd be loaded with the 220gr Nosler partitions, an easy 2750 fps would be more than enough, same/same for your elk in the timber thread.

It's a similar issue here, needing a rifle which will work on a grumpy bear at five yards but also shoot a deer or goat at 300. On one end of things is a .458 and the other a .270. A .375 worked for years but about six years ago I settled on the 9.3x62 as my primary rifle. I'll happily give up the flatter trajectory of a .300 for better bear safety.

What weight/style/make bullet do you normally use in your Mauser for an all around load? I have played with three different 9.3x62s, and I settled on the 286 Partition ( my SIL used Vortex ammo with 286 TSX) While I never killed anything with the Partition, it did shoot pretty flat, relative t the round nose. I used a 35 Whelen Ackley ( which, to me, is a much closer comparison to the 9.3x62) with the Woodleigh 310rn and was able to get a solid 2400fps. It was surprisingly flat shooting.

I've settled on the 286gr Nosler at 2400 from my 20.5" barrel. So far it's done fine on various deer, goats, and one big brown bear. I get 2525 with the 250gr Accubond but the 286s shoot fast enough for my trajectory needs and I firmly believe the 286 partition will penetrate more than any 250 grain bullet. That's not so say I don't think the 250 would work okay on a bear at spitting distance, I'm just happy to trade longer range for the better close range bear option.