Post your big game/small cartridge experience

[Coltdriver]

The little 22LR sure is underestimated. P.O. Ackley was very enthusiastic about very high velocity .22 sized rounds and recommended them to the military. He was amazed at the tissue destruction being all out of proportion to the size of the round. I zapped an antelope at 225 yards from an Ackley Improved .243. with an 85 grain partition going about 3600 FPS. I was amazed at the internal destruction from a tiny 85 grain pill.

 

[swampcrawler]

The little 22LR sure is underestimated. P.O. Ackley was very enthusiastic about very high velocity .22 sized rounds and recommended them to the military. He was amazed at the tissue destruction being all out of proportion to the size of the round. I zapped an antelope at 225 yards from an Ackley Improved .243. with an 85 grain partition going about 3600 FPS. I was amazed at the internal destruction from a tiny 85 grain pill.

I recall reading about Ackley using the 220 swift on various things, including feral donkeys, and being very impressed with it.

In fact I believe he went so far as to say if he could only keep one rifle, it would be his Swift.

That's one hell of an endorsement.

 

[alsaqr]

This 225 pound boar hog was killed at a distance of about 10 yards. Had trouble finding his ear in the 2.5 power scope of my Ruger 10/.22:

 

[DownInTheDark]

I took a 500-550ish lb 5x5 elk last year with a 130 gr corlokt .270. Broke his shoulders and he went down, but took a bit for him to give up. That same year my friends son in law took a 6x6 elk with a 22-250. Got it through the neck and was pretty much dead by the time he hit the ground; so the story goes.



PS some people say a 270 is small for an elk, but I know a lot of people that use them.

 

[Cocked & Locked]

For deer .243 and .257 Roberts as small as I want to go.

 

[ironworkerwill]

After a long afternoon of not killing any squirrels, two very young men sat on a log in despair. Heads in hand they hear an approaching animal. Armed with .22lr rifles they assured themselves it was probably a turkey and decided to watch it run away in fright. To thier surprise it was a whitetail spike. Without thinking, the oldest boy shot the deer directly between the eyes!

The deer was stunned but definitely not mortally wounded. The following hours of tracking provided evidence that the deer was alive, somewhere.

A week or so later the shooters uncle killed a spike deer with a strip of hide between it's antlers missing.

 

[lobo9er]

Inside 200 yds, a .22-250 is a whitetail slaying machine!

I've seen them killed at greater distances than that with the 22-250.

 

[Armored farmer]

I don't have many rifle stories to share because Illinois is a shotgun/BP/handgun only deer season. No cf rifles.

I have collected some experience with .223 ARs lately:
Two DRT hogs in Texas, one at 83yds the other at 200+.
This coyote on my farm fell to my 400yd offhand shot with a Ruger 556 with Nikon BDC carbine scope.


Like bang bang said in post #4.....there may have been some luck involved.

 

[farmerboy78]

Well I just recently used a new cartridge for deer. The 6.5 grendel to me is a great whitetail round. I took 2 deer on the evening of Dec 28th with amazing results. One @ 326yds and the other was @ 278yds.

 

[SoonerMedic]

TR,

Is that a red deer?

the real question is why doesn't it have legs?! LOL

 

[Hanshi]

The 250/3000, I own two, have killed more deer than I could ever count and the little .250 was NEVER outclassed. Various .22 rimfires including pistols, revolvers and rifles have taken much small game over decades. Much of this was in my callow youth. But now, and for a long time, I've hunted only with muzzleloaders, virtually always flintlocks. I use them for both large and small game. The cartridge guns are exercised at the range.

 

[hq]

7.62x39 has taken quite a few deer for me, and a lot of people say it's too light/puny/weak/inaccurate/etc for deer. Works great for under 200 yards though.

I wholeheartedly have to second that. Yesterday I had a reminder of this, bagged a nice roe deer fawn with Mini 30. Unsurprisingly the shot went through the small deer, taking out the heart and both lungs in the process and it ran 10 yards before going down, but I had a good chance to examine the wound channel while dressing it. Nice, slightly conical primary channel with very little spoiled meat due to reasonable impact velocity and mild hydrodynamic shock.

Perfect. This was with a (cheap) Barnaul 154gr soft point, which is a bit overkill for roe deer, but this was just an opportunity shot during a whitetail hunt. It worked great nevertheless. It's obvious that my other roe deer favourite, .243, would have blown out the lungs and caused considerably more meat loss. It does have quite a bit more range but even a very slightly tweaked (hand lapped and moly coated barrel, correctly torqued gas block, polished trigger, Zeiss scope) Mini 30 can reliably take a deer at up to 250 yards. And it's pure joy to carry.

IMO 7.62x39 is one of the most underrated deer calibers around. It might have a bit of bad reputation due to poor quality of most steel cased bulk ammo but even mediocre quality factory loads work amazingly well and if you don't reload, there are still some high-end factory hunting loads available.

 

[FL-NC]

The last 3 deer I killed I used 223- Hornady 75 grain OTM. 2 were DRT, last one ran 50 yards and fell over. Dime size exit holes. Many say 223 is too small but I have a freezer full of venison that says different. In the past (and still occasionally) I used 243, and had 100% success with it too. Shot placement is king, IMO. Many years ago I hunted a couple seasons with a SKS (had to sell my "good" guns to pay a divorce lawyer- painful but worth it). Killed a few white tails with it using winchester soft points in TN, but didn't care for the accuracy or performance- I considered it a 100 yard rifle. Never got exit wounds either- even on one shot at about 20 yards. Which means weak or non-existent blood trails if they run on you.