Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Killing power - where do you see the difference?

In many places around the world, you not only aren't going to be allowed to retrieve your game, but it's not yours anymore--because game belongs to the landowner, and can be sold on the open market.

This is the law in much of Europe and Africa.

Interesting. I didn't know that

In fact some European ammo companies develop bullets specifically designed to kill very quickly, so animals have less chance to cross boundaries. About 15 years ago one of them told me they'd pre-tested their latest on around 500 animals before releasing it--a very expansive bullet, which tends to kill quicker on lung shots, which Europeans often prefer because it ruins less meat, which gets sold. But quite a few European big game animals are relatively small, especially roe deer, so it doesn't take much to drop them with lung shots.

Have also been chastised by professional cullers on African cull hunts for not head-shooting everything, for the same reason. But when Americans take part in culls they're charged a small fee per animal, which offsets the meat lost.

One of the better things about such a system is that you can eat excellent game meat in almost any restaurant. The down-side is it makes hunting more expensive for the average hunter, though not any more than leasing whitetail ground here in many states.

Various countries also have different basic agreements. When I hunted in the Czech Republic in the early 1990s, the standard deal was the hunter who paid for each animal taken got the head and the innards, such as the heart, liver, etc. Everything else was negotiated for a price.

One ranch I hunted in Namibia was owned by a family that also owned a local restaurant, and all the meat that wasn't eaten by paying clients or the family went to the restaurant. Same deal when Eileen and I took part in a deer cull in Ireland: The landowner was the last British lord to still live in Ireland (all the rest had been blown up, or driven out), and a local restaurant regularly offered fallow and red deer recipes from "Lord Rosse's deer."

Again, we were encouraged to use head shots whenever possible, or other meat-saving placement.

Danish. Interesting that you asked - I guess a little appreciation for staying in shape & engaging in rigorous healthy fun is part of how I was raised.

MD - thank you for so many insightful comments!

Yes. The title to the thread reads "Killing power-where do you see the difference"? So dead is dead. Now if the title had read something like "most instant drops/shortest distance traveled-where do you see the difference" then the time it took the animal to die or the distance traveled after the hit would be part of the subject matter.

Yeah, "insightful comments"- DEAD IS DEAD.

What is your next dumb question?

Since the OP didn’t mention the animal, but he mentions tree stands, middle of the road cartridges and being from Vermont, I assume we are talking deer here. Honestly aside from my first buck that had his shoulder broken with a .30-30, I never saw a DRT using arrows, 12 gauge slug, .308, .30-06, 7mm RM or .300 WM. Lung shots made no difference and actually using heavy for caliber bullets, I came to the realization that I was blowing the hell out of the woods behind the deer and that those heavy and premium bullets were never intended to be ideal for deer. Switching to faster opening 140 grain SST’s or Ballistic Tips from a 7mm-08 have given me more DRT results than every other chambering listed above. That has been the difference that I’ve seen in lethality.

I'm 75% Norwegian... we don't feel alive without pain & suffering

Brad - Nailed it 😂
Im pretty close to 75% Dane & 25% French. Long story. (Not everyone agrees about how this travesty occurred 😜)

Tree stands are literally my largest life challenge in my fulfillment as a hunter. I won’t hate but I’m just not that guy.

Get me mentally exhausted after 6 rainy hunting days in a bivy or under a pack full of dead weight looking at 4-5 solo trips along the same damn trail, full blown cold weather, in the dark alone on a mountain and I’m seriously thinking that my grandfather would be smiling at me. As a younger guy, he didn’t care about the size of the animals I was able to harvest - he was way more interested in how much it sucked & how much the pack weighed and then if I could bring him some burger.

Hunting = Hygge

There is no “Like” button on 24hr, all I can say is “amen.”

We speak the same language…

I could say a lot more, but won’t clog up your thread!

Am only half Norwegian--the other parts are Dutch, Scots-Irish and little bit of "Native American" from upstate New York. It all adds up to stubborn....

Ha! Most of the rest of my 25% is Scots-Irish… stubborn indeed!

Hahaha. Stubborn? No just very, very sure that the path others are choosing isn’t right and unwilling to correct them because it’s more prudent for one to learn their own lessons. Don’t even get me started on black coffee.

So killing power…lol

I just wonder if there’s not a slight edge to bullets that are larger in diameter, especially in exit wound size ? I just shot my first deer with a 338 cal bullet (fusion 200 gr.), and the exit wound was behind the shoulder and snapped the shoulder blade in two and never actually struck the shoulder bone.

We pay our money and take our choice of big game bullets... out of ignorance.

Ignorance, because bullet choice is dwarfed by shot placement, and we only shoot a few big game animals a year.
I use Nos bal tips, because I have an ignorant opinion.


But shooing rodents.. I have shot 1000 in a day... and still ignorance, as no controlled comparison, I just kept shooting Vmax bullets.

Just like accuracy rituals... who knows which of these rituals are worth the effort?

I published a chapter partly on the effect of larger bullet diameter in my BIG BOOK OF GUN GACK II in 2018. The entire chapter was on the subject of theories of killing power on big game, but it occurred to me that the "bullet" diameter that does the work for most hunting these days is the expanded diameter of bullets.

I have been lucky enough to not only get to hunt a lot, but see a lot of other hunters in faction. Consequently I have a good-sized collection of expanding bullets recovered from big game, so measured the expansion of the "mushroom" in the widest and narrowest places, then averaged them. Then I compared bullets of different calibers, and one of the more interesting things that occurred was the expansion of .338 caliber bullets averaged slightly LESS than that of .30 caliber bullets.

Now, some of this was due to chance. While my collection includes a wide variety of bullet makes, some bullets tend to result a FAR wider mushroom than others, in particular "bonded" bullets of various sorts. But even after doing some correcting for that factor, there still wasn't a significant difference in expansion width between .30 and .338 caliber, and none occurred until expanded diameter was considerably larger--or at least appeared to. My collection of recovered 9.3mm and .375 bullets did average larger than the .30s and .338s, but the sample was also smaller, because one thing I've found over the decades is that fewer 9.3 and .375 bullets are recovered. Is this due to their often typically greater weight? Perhaps.

I also have sometimes seen more "visible impact" when big game is shot with 9.3 and .375 bullets, but whether that kills animals quicker I dunno. Have still seen plenty of animals go for 50+ yards before falling with broadside heart-lung shots from both 9.3s and .375s, and quite a few of those animals have been more-or-less "deer sized."

Another example at the opposite end of the caliber spectrum occurred just yesterday evening, when Eileen and I shot a couple of doe whitetails on a local ranch. They were eating too much of the rancher's hayfields, and he really wanted some taken, so we volunteered, partly because we each had a doe whitetail tag.

It was very easy "hunting." We just waited on the edge of the hayfield until deer came out, and then selected bigger does. I shot the first, at 230 yards, with my 6.5 PRC, using the 127-grain Barnes LRX bullet at around 3100 fps. The doe was quartering toward me, and I tried to put the bullet inside the near shoulder so save meat. At the shot the deer started running toward the trees bordering the field, but after 50 yards slowed, stopped and fell over.

I then headed into the trees to find Eileen, who was sitting maybe 350 yards further along the edge of the woods. She'd actually watched my deer go down, but hadn't shot it because she hadn't quite decided whether it was a mature doe. While we sat there some more deer came out, and in one small group were two obviously bigger does, with one slightly bigger than the other. It started wandering closer to us as it fed, and eventually got within 270 yards, according to my laser rangefinder, and stood there in the same position as mine had, quartering toward us.

At Eileen's shot I heard the thump of the bullet hitting, and the doe made the little hop often indicating a heart shot, then took off across the field. After about 50 yards it slowed, stopped and fell.

The bullet placement was just about identical on both deer, inside the shoulder, but Eileen's bullet was considerably smaller--a 70-grain Hornady GMX monolithic started at 3300 fps from a .22-250 with a 1-8 twist barrel. I might calculate the remaining energy of each bullet later, but obviously the 6.5 bullet should have hit a lot "harder."

This is also obviously an example of one, but there it is.

Answering to the OP... I see the difference in where you hit them and the path the bullet follows, but pointing out that two apparently equally placed shots might have different effects due to one braking a major artery or a major nerve, for example, and another one just passing close but without touching it.

Even with the same cartridge and bullet and point of impact and position of the animal this is a thing that can happen.

Basically I thing the old saying that it is where you hit them and not what you hit them with still applies. Within limits, of course.

VarmintGuy, I have no doubt that big game has been killed with a 22 L.R., although I haven't seen it done. Even with careful bullet placement, I wouldn't rely on it. I base this not on animals shot with a 22 L.R. but by observing people shot with one. In one instance, a teenage boy was shot precisely between the eyes. He remained conscious and was able to describe exactly what happened, while waiting for an ambulance to arrive.

I had a discussion with the surgeon at the hospital about the path of the bullet. The bullet , a 40 grain solid, split on entering the skull, one half continuing straight and lodging between the lobes of the brain. The other half of the bullet veered to the right and lodged against the optic nerve. The half that was lodged against the optic nerve was later removed. The boy completely recovered, aside an occasional headache. Unfortunately, he was killed a couple years later in a collision with a tree.

The other shootings I witnessed with a 22 L.R. were in the chest cavity and were also not lethal. That doesn't mean that people or animals can't be killed with a 22 L.R. but convinces me that they aren't reliable, even with careful placement.

It seems to me that the rate of how fast the bullet expands would have the most effect on killing power. I have no way of knowing if Remington loads the same 150 grain pointed Core-Lokt into say a .300 Savage that they load into a .300 WM. A .338 bullet probably has a thicker jacket than a .308 bullet because it is intended for larger game animals. A deer is only 12 inches wide through the brisket and without hitting bone, that isn't a lot of resistance to fully expand a bullet. Then too it isn't the thickness of the jacket, but more the hardness of the jacket and the lead. I sure wish that I had made use of the company's Brinell metal harness tester for measuring bullets back when I had access to it. Thinner jackets on .257 caliber bullets are likely why they have the reputation of being faster deer killing bullets than the larger caliber bullets. I seem to remember that was the conclusion of that Carolina deer shooting study measuring the run distance after the shot on over 400 hunting preserve deer.