Argument against small caliber? Blood trail/exit wounds?

[alexnelon]

Then speak of comparatively equally performing bullets , then, if both is devastating, which is more devastating?

Wrong question. It doesn't matter which is more devastating once you pass the threshold of "devastating enough to kill the animal in seconds"

Dead is dead. A good .338 bullet at 1800 fps doesn't kill an animal any more dead than a good .223 bullet at 1800 fps.

Considering *equally performing bullets*, the question should be; which one has a higher hit probability? and the answer is - whichever smaller caliber with less recoil meets the minimum lethality requirement at a given distance.

 

[K9kodi]

Wrong answer.

There’s two factors, the more important one being which one has a higher hit probability. That is not at all cartridge related, or more correctly stated, a larger variable of human performance vs bullet performance. We’re talking about bullet performance, not human and bullet performance. If people wanna say a 77tmk is better than a poor 30 or 33 cal bullet, then I can say a marksman who is fantastic with his 338 is better then a shitty shooter with a .22 caliber bullet.

I wholly agree, you can’t get anymore dead than dead.
Death is mostly a product of blood loss, I believe more devastation will equal to more blood loss quicker and give more room for human error while still providing lethality. Bc let’s face it, shitty shots happen if you’ve hunted long enough

 

[cole96]

Depends on the bullets being used.

I mean lets just dumb it down a little...or a lot.

Without the real difference maker, which is bullet design.

Someone needs to convince me that the roughly 1.5" long, 1/3" wide bullet size is absolutely a dominate killing force that's probably too big for most NA game outside of elk and bear. While the 1.25" long, little bigger then 1/5" wide bullet size is basically too small for hunting.....so that 1/4" difference in length and 1.5 tenths of an inch difference in diameter is everything when it comes to killing animals...

Of course not, that would be ludicrous to even suggest...(except dang near everyone believes or believed it at some point, including me). Or maybe its just that we just took the weird marketing, and never turned on our logical brains to think things through.

That .338 bullet may have the potential to do more objective damage, but if the bullet being used is designed for a maximum weight retention with some expansion, and it bores say 3/4" permanent cavity through the vitals, and the .224 sized bullet is designed for heavy expansion and fragmentation, and it blows say a 1.5" permanent cavity through the vitals, well, now which one is the killer, pretty obvious again. That 3/4" hole is enough to harvest the animal sure, but its clearly doing less damage, higher probability of animal going further before going down etc etc etc.

Now, functionally, at some point there is diminishing returns. Is blowing a baseball sized hole through the chest vs. a softball sized hole through the chest making a functional difference in ethical harvest of the animal....maybe I guess, but your getting to the point where that animal is functionally going down very quickly either way.

I get what you're saying just based on measurements. But yes they absolutely do kill better. Ive shot probably 100 animals with a 257 weatherby and quite a bit with a 300 win mag. The .308 bullet blows the .257 bullet out of the water for terminal performance. Which further solidifies my statement. I get not everyone wants to shoot a big bullet. Animals definitely die quicker with a big wound going through it that a tiny one. Even comparing apples to oranges its not close and apples to apples it would be more one sided. I get it rokslide if very fond of small-bore bullets, but they do not kill the same. Yes, the end result is they are dead.

 

[Q_Sertorius]

Then speak of comparatively equally performing bullets , then, if both is devastating, which is more devastating?

Until someone can show me autopsied animals on which “a marginal hit with a bigger bullet resulted in a clean, quick kill, where a smaller bullet would not have done so”, this is all just theoretical nonsense.

This is the kind of stuff my old man, my little brother, and their friends say, “with this [magnum cartridge], I can hit them anywhere in the body and they go down.” I know this isn’t true.

I loaded their ammunition. I know it wasn’t loaded with “tough bullets.” I know what those .277, .284, .308, .323, and .366 bullets do when they hit the vitals (by which I mean heart and/or lungs, I am not counting CNS hits). The same thing the equivalent .243, .257, or .264 bullet does when it hits the vitals.* They kill the animal within about ten seconds.

Unfortunately, I also know what those larger, heavier bullets do when they don’t hit the vitals. The same thing that smaller bullets do when they don’t hit the vitals. I’ve tracked their deer 400-800 yards down the mountain after they ham, gut, or liver shot them. I’ve cleaned their deer and seen the massive wounds. I know the bullets didn’t pencil through or otherwise fail to upset. I’ve dragged their ham, gut, and liver-shot deer 400-800 yards back up the other side of the mountain and then down our side of it. I’ve thrown away hams and loins hit by poor shots. Fortunately, it’s not a huge sample size, but it’s enough to convince me that placement trumps displacement every time.

I’ll assume, for the sake of argument, that a .338 TMK might make a softball-sized wound channel while a .224 TMK only makes a baseball-sized wound channel. But I have yet to see a “near miss on the vitals” result in a clean, quick kill on any animal. And that includes near-misses on the CNS, which can often knock an animal down temporarily or put it down without killing it. I’ve had to cut a few throats in my time.

If you believe so strongly in it, go out and cull some deer and try to replicate the extra lethality of the bigger bullet. Aim back a bit further with whatever .338-always-kills-em magnum you want and see how well it goes. But have your tracking dog ready…

* - I have never seen, firsthand, a wound on a deer made by a .224 bullet. They are illegal where I hunt. But based on the .223 thread, I accept they would also work. I simply don’t mention them above because I haven’t seen it firsthand.

PS - if my proposed culling scenario as an intentional test seems inhumane or unethical to you, please consider that you are advocating for an unintentional test of this method every time you argue that “a larger caliber has more margin for error.” The fatal woundings, without recovery, of thousands of animals every year could be avoided if we stopped accepting unfounded hypotheses about “larger caliber means more margin for error.” In the real world, it means “more error.”

 

[Chris in TN]

Ive shot probably 100 animals with a 257 weatherby and quite a bit with a 300 win mag. The .308 bullet blows the .257 bullet out of the water for terminal performance. Which further solidifies my statement.

There were a lot of years when dad and I hunted together, when he had a farm with a bunch of does, and we'd sometimes kill multiples at a time (2 or 3 was very common, I got pretty good at making doubles with a muzzleloader, and we got 4 between us once) and over the years we experimented with various calibers a good bit.

We have had days when we would end up with multiple deer laying in the yard after dark, and one was shot with a .300Wby and another was shot with 25-06 and another was shot with 30-06 or 7mmRM or 280ai and, from about 2006-2016 or so, a bunch of them were shot with my little 6.8spc.

The worst recovery I've ever saw started with dad's 300wby. But there weren't many of those. Most of the deer either died within 50 yards or dropped in their tracks. And of those, not once did I ever get to the point that I could correlate the animal's reaction to the shot, against what it was shot with. Well hit stuff simply died. Poorly hit stuff did not. We can talk about bloodtrails and terminal damage found after the fact, but at the end of the day, if I'd collected all the data from all of those years, and tried to create a regression equation from it, the single largest predictor of recovery distance would undoubtedly have been shot placement (shoulders and/or CNS versus heart or double lung versus liver or marginal lung, versus everything else) and maybe impact velocity (which, for calibers under .35, could be divided simply into two camps - one over 2000' and one under 2000') and we might have been able to separate out another group based on bullet construction (cup/core vs bonded vs mono). But that's it. For bullets between 6.8/85 and .30/180, at no point was there every any notable distinction based on caliber or weight. It didn't matter. I've sat there looking at two deer shot with 6.8spc and .300wby, or 25-06 and 280ai, and they looked the same, or, if there was any notable difference, it was explained almost wholly by impact velocity and sometimes by construction, not caliber or weight.

The single best bad hit with a short recovery, that I remember, was with my 6.8spc. My wife went hunting with me once, shot a buck, hit it a bit far back, and it ran perhaps 75 yards, out of our sight, and we listened and heard it fall, before I realized she'd hit it a bit back in the liver and very rear of one lung.

The single biggest surprise was a quartering-to high shoulder shot deer that I expected to drop, and it did not. That was with my 6.8spc at maybe 100-110 yards. It ran maybe 20 yards and fell dead.

The single 'worst' loss that I could maybe halfway - sort of - blame on bullet, was a steep quartering away shot, perhaps 150 yards, with a 30-06 and a Hornady 150sst. To this day I believe I hit the deer well, in the rear of the left ribs, angling towards the off shoulder. Couldn't find the deer. Fast forward two months and it's rabbit season and the nasty pine thicket undergrowth has died back a bit and we found his head, about 100 yards away, in a place that you couldn't have seen him unless you'd stepped on him. For that scenario - whitetails in nasty stuff where you can't see more than a few feet - I still like blood trails.

All of that to say, I've never seen where the .300Wby bullets blew anything else out of the water. We used 168NBTs, 180NABs, 185 Bergers, and 150 Hornady Interbonds. There might have been something else I'm forgetting, but that's a pretty good sample of the spectrum of what was available back then.


ETA: And I will also freely admit that along the way I *did* develop the opinion that those .300Wbys killed like lightning. Because they generally did. But guess what? I then developed the same opinion about dad's 25-06 and then my 6.8spc. Make of that what you will. But we no longer own the .300s (we had two) nor the 7mmRMs (had two IIRC) and I don't even shoot the .280ai at deer anymore. I still have the 6.8. and numerous 5.56s).

 

[K9kodi]

I’ll never be able to convince a Chevy guy ford is better and vice versa. Two camps people are , well camped.

 

[streamerfish]

I get what you're saying just based on measurements. But yes they absolutely do kill better. Ive shot probably 100 animals with a 257 weatherby and quite a bit with a 300 win mag. The .308 bullet blows the .257 bullet out of the water for terminal performance. Which further solidifies my statement. I get not everyone wants to shoot a big bullet. Animals definitely die quicker with a big wound going through it that a tiny one. Even comparing apples to oranges its not close and apples to apples it would be more one sided. I get it rokslide if very fond of small-bore bullets, but they do not kill the same. Yes, the end result is they are dead.

Yes, animals die quicker with a bigger wound going through it, a bigger wound cavity. Agree 100. But that is determined almost entirely by bullet choice, not bullet size. Alot of bullets touted to be top picks shot out of a 300 WM are going to create much smaller holes/wound cavities then the higher fragmenting bullets shot out of smaller calibers. Its really not debatable at this point.

If your shooting say a 180 grain AccuBond out of that .300 WM, and a 134gr ELDM out of the .257 Weatherby.......

That Accubond is bigger, badder, tougher, maybe considered one of the all time top 5 modernish elk setups etc etc......But that 134 ELDM is gonna cause a level of damage that is many orders of magnitude larger then the Accubond can dream of....We are talking a wound cavity several times larger. Like, its not even a competition type of damage.

I "could" drive the 115-117 (whichever they decide) TMK in a 6mm Creed and dog walk that Accubond all day long on the level of carnage produced.

I won't ever argue that the .300 WM is a bad gun, it clearly isn't. I won't argue the ability of the Accubond to take game, it clearly does so just fine and dandy. And I won't argue against the virtue of using them. Especially if your trying to find a balance of lethality and meat preservation.

But for absolute terminal performance. Pure ability to end the animals life as quickly as possible. There is no argument over this. Picking the most lethal bullet matters. The caliber doesn't.

 

[K9kodi]

Right, so pick a comparative bullet for a .22 or .25 and then 300wm

 

[streamerfish]

Right, so pick a comparative bullet for a .22 or .25 and then 300wm

I dont anyone has argued this the multiple times you've brought it up.

Given the same bullet, in different sizes, I think it's reasonable to assume, given a big enough sample size, that the bigger bullet is giving you a bigger wound cavity on average.

Although, I think your roi so to speak isn't comparably greater. Especially in the high fragment bullets. I havent seen much to lead me to believe that its anywhere near as drastic of a difference as bullet choice is.

I dont think your gonna see much of a difference between a 150gr 6.5 and a 180gr .308 tmk or whatever real world. Its potentially there, but realistically, probably not observable.

Probably more of a difference if its a 77gr .224 vs a 225gr .338 or something.

 

[270-300]

What bleeds more, one 4-inch hole or two 1/2-inch holes?

Hole size doesnt matter for blood loss. Location and blood pressure do.

 

[streamerfish]

And BTW, just to be clear....

I'm not advocating that everyone should be shooting tmk, or eldm, or berger or whatever.

I dont have the luxury of hunting all the time, killing a bunch of game every year etc.

Trying to find a balance of preserving meat/not hitting the nuclear bullet option, and cleanly harvesting the animal is a thing in my book.

Personally, I believe that a bit of a middle ground is probably a good place to be for the majority of us. Especially if we are taking most of our shots at ranges where b.c. isn't a huge issue.

Heck, I dont really know what im gonna shoot for deer and potentially black bear this year, I dont want to go full nuclear and trash entire front half if I catch the shoulders. Deer especially, im generally hunting pretty open spaces, maybe a eldx, maybe try the ablr.

Elk due to where im hunting, im more leaning towards bigger wounds cavity, better chance of dropping faster. Maybe a berger, (for unexplainable reasons im berger curious).

My point being. Lets not muddy the waters between a decision tree of what bullet to choose to hunt with involving multiple factors(price, availability, lethality, meat loss, how it shoots in gun, etc) and discussing what bullets are actually the most lethal taking other considerations out of the equation.