Hunting bullet performance - prefer through or a grenade inside?

[35WhelenAI]

195 yds. I’ve killed a bunch of deer and a few antelope with that bullet and get an exit about half the time on deer. It’s super accurate out of my rifle.

For what it's worth, I get exits on anything but hard quartering shots out to 355 yards with the TTSX from the Whelen AI (.358 200 TTSX) on elk and more than adequate destruction of the vitals to cause certain death. 270 Win and 30-06 shooting a 110 TTSX and 130 TTSX respectively exit on deer sized animals out to 400 yds. Never shot at an animal beyond 400 yds, so no experience past that.

 

[TradLife406]

I switched to Bergers this year in my 6.5 PRC and Creed. They worked amazing. Before I was using the ELDX and it worked. But the 140 and 156 elite hunters seemed to work better. Shooting whitetails from 2-750 yards they'd go in as advertised then blow a huge out on the way out.
Shot eight deer. Seven with the PRC and one with the Creed.

I've played with most of the other popular bullets and they work. But that full energy dump seems to work better. I really like the Accubonds in some cals. But in like my 270 Wby it seemed to just slip through and I had one mulie doe run several hundred yards with a hole in both lungs. But the same bullet in the 243 or 308 worked great. So there maybe be something to a bullet working better in certain cals than others.

 

[hereinaz]

I switched to Bergers this year in my 6.5 PRC and Creed. They worked amazing. Before I was using the ELDX and it worked. But the 140 and 156 elite hunters seemed to work better. Shooting whitetails from 2-750 yards they'd go in as advertised then blow a huge out on the way out.
Shot eight deer. Seven with the PRC and one with the Creed.

I've played with most of the other popular bullets and they work. But that full energy dump seems to work better. I really like the Accubonds in some cals. But in like my 270 Wby it seemed to just slip through and I had one mulie doe run several hundred yards with a hole in both lungs. But the same bullet in the 243 or 308 worked great. So there maybe be something to a bullet working better in certain cals than others.

That’s my experience with Berger as well.

 

[35WhelenAI]

The same bullet in different calibers to me is always gonna be subject to some difference in construction. Would be impossible to make them on the same scale to each other (jacket thickness relative to bullet diameter to dictate expansion characteristics, core hardness in different diameters, etc) and thus performance. Like I've shared, vitals out out of commission and a hole going in and out. Monos do it for me reliably and many other bullets of different construction do what others ask of them so we're all after the same thing with a dead animal.

 

[WhoGarrDen]

100% !!
It depends on where you’re hunting and what you’re hunting.
My daughter shot a deer this year that was little far back.
After the shot he ran about 50 yards and stood right at the edge of 6ft tall crp for about 2 minutes before going down in sight. Shooting 6creed 103eldx suppressed.
I think if not shooting suppressed he probably would of been running through that crp for those two minutes with zero blood. That would of been very difficult to find.

For my son's hunt this year we were in thick woods with some steeper angles, but got a nice shot opportunity at 80 yards. The deer all but disappeared after the first 30 yards of running but we could hear it hit the ground. Took out the heart, and blood everywhere all the way to the scene of the crash 60 yards away. Although we could have found it with a bit of work without the blood, we were glad to have easy trail. There's almost never snow on the ground during our deer rifle seasons.

For my hunt, it was wide open rolling hills. I had ELD-X's loaded in my 7mm-08 and was able to watch the deer run and fall without leaving the scope. I think we both had great bullets for the application and plan to stick with this formula going forward - frangible for open with potentially longer shots, and bonded or similar for those <150yd shots where the deer can be gone in the blink of an eye and a blood trail helps immensely.