Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters What cartridges don't kill as well as the book would suggest?

I would agree that the 250 Savage doesn't kill as well as the book would suggest -it kills much, much better than the book would suggest.

Amen Mr. ScottyB. This thread has turned into a .243 lovefest and fantastic stories about 22lr, 222, etc. kills. The flipside of this anecdotal posting is what we are hearing is postive because few people like to discuss bad experiences. I would be the first to tell you that I have had some bad experiences with the .224 calibers and have seen plenty of other individuals experience the same and with .243 and 6mm. Having said that...now go ahead and accuse me of being a bad shot. It was me not the cartridge or bullet. I expect that from the defenders of the aforementioned calibers.

These calibers shoot bigger than what they are...I hear that rhetoric ad nauseum. Well here is a little anectdotal piece for you. I have hunted the same private land patch of Wisconsin woods the first two days of the nine day season for the past 40 years. Private property on three sides with several thousand acres public land on the other. This patch of woods does not hold many deer year around, however when the blaze orange army starts shooting on all sides of me there is a sudden population explosion of deer. There has been only one or two years in that time period that a hunter has not come by our tree stands trailing a wounded deer. With a few exceptions, those hunters were packing 222, 223, 22/250, 243 and 6mms. Toss in a dandy this year...a guy from Illinois drove his ATV across my hayfield in hot pursuit with a 32/20. My son shot the 10 pointer near his treestand, let the guy tag it then called the County Sheriff on his cellphone...trespasser. I would not say the 32/20 was shooting bigger than it was.

Hi roundoak,

We have the same guys in France or in Europe, they tell stories about their success but never on the failures. For me there's only one response: with good shot placement use enough gun, adapted to the game you hunt and more than that use enough "bullet". There's no glory in using the smallest weakest caliber to hunt game. Hunting ain't no survival.

Dom

I believe that one's opinions of the suitability of certain cartridges are dependent on any number of factors related to our own experience and requirements. If one is hunting under conditions which you describe on smaller woodlots or thick brush or forested conditions (probably such as previous poster Alabama Ed does) you would be more inclined to use a cartridge somewhat more likely to produce a DRT kill. I would, for example use my .270 or 7x57 for that.

I have personally never hunted anywhere East of Wyoming and generally hunt in pretty open terrain. If I shoot a deer with my 250 Savage and he wanders off 50 or 100 yards before he decides it's time to lay down I am not going to be overly concerned about it. I've never even come close to losing one.

Now Mr. Atkinson relates how he prefers a pretty stout cartridge for his elk hunting because he likes to hunt the dark timber and doesn't want one wandering into a deep canyon or blowdown jungle. Very legitimate. I, on the other hand, when I lived on the West Slope in Colorado, never used anything bigger than my 7x57 and had no problems -it was somewhat open country I hunted.
At the same time if you had asked Ray's Dad if he thought his 250 Savage was enough gun for elk he would have looked at you as if you had two heads!

Lots of different experiences and requirements determine which cartridges we all prefer but one thing is for certain -put a good bullet in the right place and then grab your knife because the fun is over and the work begins!

Dom, you made my point in a few choice words, sorry it took me
more than a few.

I find no sport in limiting my chances to humanely harvest a game animal. I want to stack the odds in my favor and will seek out every advantage possible....no roll of the dice for me.

An interesting phenomenon is occuring in my neck of the deer woods. Farms with good deer habitat are being sold and in some cases carved up into smaller parcels.
Neighbors used to hunt each others land and there was always respect for each other. I scratch your back, you scratch mine. Now many private lands are posted and have become mini-hunting preserves. It is getting so that if you shoot a deer on your property you had better make sure it does not leave that property, because the guy across the fence may claim it or will not allow access.

There is a lot of competion on public land also because less and less private land is available to hunt and if you shoot a deer it better not travel to far or you will likely find a gut pile at the end of the trail or worse yet get in an argument over the deer.

So whats my point here? Many hunters I know that were shooting the light calibers for years are moving up to heavier fire power to improve there success in dropping or anchoring a deer. Increasing their odds...

I've spent far more time tracking elk, deer and blackbears shot with 30 cal and above then with below 30 cal rounds.
If a remotely correct bullet is used it always comes down to shot placement. A 338 in the guts is still a gut shot, if a varmint bullet makes it to the boiler room the fight is all over. I mostly hunt with 6.5 to 30 cal firearms but it really doesn't matter.

Roundoak I can definitely see that. I think if I were hunting under the conditions you describe I would probably be carrying my 7x57 with 160 or 175 grain partitions and attempting to take that shoulder shot which in my experience is a combination that tends to settle things right then and there. Not the proper situation for 223, 243, or 250 and the heart/lung shot. Some day, God willing, I will hunt the upper Midwest and find out for myself!

To Mr. Rogue: I think you are probably correct in what you say. The best hunters and the best game shots I have been around in my 40 plus years of hunting have all shot 243's, 250's, 270's, 280's and 30-06's. And they did not spend much if any time tracking wounded game. I think quite a few magnum caliber rifles get purchased by inexperienced and unfortunately misguided fellows who adopt a "bigger is better" philosophy. They then have the rifle bore sighted and proceed forth to the hunting fields maybe having fired the rifle just enough to develop a flinch. I have seen a few of these guys in action over the years and the results are not great.

When I was about 15 my Dad and I were in Utah on opening day of Deer Season. I had situated myself on the sidehill of an aspen filled draw leading up the mountain from a big alfalfa field. This was before I had saved the money to buy my very own 270 and I was hunting with my cousin's Savage Model 340 30-30 with open sights. Anyway at first light along come a string of Does followed by a real nice 4x5 buck -certainly the biggest I had ever seen on the hoof. I was waiting until he got closer as he was heading right up the draw toward me when a shot rang out and he hit the deck like a sack of potatoes. A hunter had been below and down the draw from me and I had never known he was there. In any case I was quite diasappointed but trundled on down to help him with the Buck. As it turns out he was a Marine just home from his tour of duty in Viet Nam (this was about 1967) and he had shot that Buck right in the heart with a 222. I was shocked as I had never even heard of using such a round on Deer let alone a monster buck such as the one he had downed. But he had put that bullet right in the heart and that big old Buck's heart was pulverized. I learned a very valuable lesson about shot placement that day. It might have even been valuable enough to be worth having that big Buck shot out from under me. Well almost anyway! Incidentally my rifle-money saving plan got real intense after that experience and I never hunted with that open sight 30-30 again. I bought my 270 and scoped it and determined that next time I would shoot the Buck as soon as possible!

I'm after sort of a trifecta of terminal performance from my deer cartridge. I tend to hunt in the rain, an the ranges I shoot them at tend to range fron very close to very very close <grin>. This year's buck was at maybe 10 yards. The doe, maybe 20 yards. I blew a chance the night before on a doe that was about 8 feet away at one point.

Anyway, the trifecta is: I want it to put the animal down fast. I want a red carpet of blood, if it doesn't. And I want this with minimal bloodshot. I try not to shoot "meat" but sometimes that's the angle you get...

The .358 has been VERY impressive in delivering this trifecta on deer for me. I would say it whacks them out of proportion to it's "mere" .308 parent case size.

Elk are a different hunt. More open country, much bigger critter, etc. There, I'm thinking in terms of putting the animal down ASAP, but I'm not real worried about bloodshot since ranges are longer and there's so much more meat. All I can really say there is I've been impressed by how "mid-premium" bullets (Accubonds mostly) from large cartridges have performed.

What consistantly boggles my mind- in the context of how much guys like us overthink this stuff, is how much some guys completely ignore it! I'll pick on my own brother. He was a poor college student, I was flush (oh, to be flush again... sigh... grin...) so I bought him a 30-06 and put a Leupold on it. I dinked around handloading for it, but in the end, found that it just loved 165-gn factory Corelokt. Fine. I'll make him use something else for elk but there's his deer load. I tell him this over... and over.. give him an empty box of the stuff for reference. So next season, he shows up with... ta da! A couple fresh boxes of 150-gn Winchester ammo. Not through testing or research mind you; just because that's what they sold him...

I'm sure the Win 150's would zap any deer walking but point is, he was extremely casual about the whole thing, and I guess that's typical for a large proportion of hunters.

Most guys don't give a rip. Truth is that 150 power point/corelokt/interlock will kill any deer from even very steep angles from the 3006. It'll work pretty effectively on elk as well.

I don't recall ever hearing or reading a negative remark on the 358 Winchester, especially for anchoring them in the thick stuff-not throught thick stuff as in your experiments.

I've an uncle that claims the worst blood shot deer he ever killed was from a 358 out of a mdl 99. Know idea what bullet, he usually shoots handloads. He has been known to tell a yarn so how really knows. Wouldn't be suprised if it was a pistol bullet going 3000.

The .338's and .300 mags I've seen used killed no better than a 30-06. That's good of course, but the they didn't seem to provide any extra "killing power."

M1 Carbine stoked with ball ammo. In high school a friend took down a nice 4X3 buck, the buck took 4 or 5 hits in the chest before he went down in a hail of gunfire (semi-auto rapid fire mode)after taking one in the head. The buck died, but it was not text book by any means.

Another one is the 38 special, on a sow black bear by a houndsman friend. The bullets richochet'd off the poor bear's skull, a 30-30 put her down for good.

MtnHtr