When you want to read a little .....

[JimT]

if you haven't read Dr. Chris Ryan's "OVERKILL AND UNDERKILL" ... it contains some interesting things about bullets and what they do ...

https://leverguns.com/articles/overkill.htm

[Bearskinner]

All the more reason to start at. .4X caliber and go up from there in diameter and weight. Good read

[piller]

If you can, match your gun and cartridge to the possible game to be shot. Don't use a .22 Magnum on a 350 pound wild boar, and don't expect to get much meat off of a squirrel shot with a .270. Taylor knew more about hunting than I could ever learn, and I am open to learning.

[Ray]

Deleted.

[mickbr]

Article makes a good point that taylors KO forumula refers to concussing elephant with head shots that miss the brain. The bigger the gun the longer they get knocked out even if the brain is missed and felt it happened often enough to correlate it to his formula.

When the recent safari boom took off and the internet put folks in touch, the reports from the gamefields were no one was seeing this knockout phenomenon, not regularly anyway. The elephant either died from the brain shot, or runs with a bullet in its head. Which was embarassing being Taylor is considered the grandaddy of safari knowledge.. Thoughts were either he was seeing something we dont understand or he was spicing up his writings.

[JimT]

Thoughts were either he was seeing something we dont understand or he was spicing up his writings.

While either is a possibility, I normally take it that there is nothing certain. I have made shots on game that put down many others before that time, but this time just did not work. One notable instance -- I made an uphill shot on a Javelina using my 7 1/2" 45 Colt Ruger Blackhawk. The load was a cast 300 gr. slug at 1100 fps. At the shot the little pig rolled downhill, got up and ran off directly away from me. I put the sights on its butt and fired again. It kept going and ran over the hill. I worked my way down and around and eventually found it laying under some brush. I thought maybe it was dead, but there was a large ravine between me and it, so I threw a rock at it. The rock landed near it and it raised its head to look around. I shot at its head and it rolled out and fell over the cliff into the ravine ... 15 foot or more drop. It laid in the ravine giving a squall and then it was quiet.

I worked my way down to it and found it was dead. The first shot - uphill - had broken the left front leg, gone through the chest penetrating the heart and out the right shoulder. The shot in the rear entered the left rear ham, went up through the heart and exited the chest. The shot at the head broke its jaw.

I think the fall into the ravine killed it.

How that little critter could take 2 hits through the lungs and heart and run that far and still not die I will never know. I just take it that nothing is certain.

[Scott Tschirhart]

He saw very few expanded handgun bullets...... Riveted and smeared a bit from bone impact were the norm. Almost no expansion in soft tissue or organs.....

Bullets are better now. But we still see a lot of this. The one load that always seemed to expand, whether from a 2, 4 or 6 inch barrel was the 125 gr Remington scalloped hollow point .357 load. If I have to shoot anyone with a pistol, that's the load I would want to use. It isn't a death ray as it is still a handgun, but it really tears up the flesh.

On the other hand, in all my years in law enforcement and later in defending police shooting cases, I never saw anyone walk away from a load of OO buck or 12 ga slug to the chest or abdomen.

[Grizz]

as to concussing brains, in commercial fishing i found that a shot just above a king salmon's head with a 22 would often pacify it, sometimes as well as a shot through the brain. the objective with a lip hooked fish was to make it possible to gaff without losing the fish.

OTOH, i once shot a 300 pound halibut thru the brain location with 4 or 5 rounds of 357mag, and still could not get it out of the water because of how hard it was thrashing. i lashed it to the rigging, and as it was shaking the mast and entire rig i towed it into a harbor, by which time it had expired.

shoot enough fish and it will show me that the shot is not absolutely certain.

it is not uncommon to see heart shot deer run eighty or so yards, and get stopped by a tree. to find on opening them that the heart had exploded when the bullet passed thru, that hydraulic shock thing...

[Grizz]

Scott,

On the other hand, in all my years in law enforcement and later in defending police shooting cases, I never saw anyone walk away from a load of OO buck or 12 ga slug to the chest or abdomen.

He didn't walk away, but in Alaska a man i knew and fished around was in Hoonah. The local LEOs hated this guy. One day they chased him down the commercial dock and gunned him down. He was shot by 3 or 4 cops multiple times with pistols, and with a shotgun, all at about point blank range.

Someone got a helicoptor out there and got him to a hospital and probably more than one. The man survived! He was in the hospital for over a year I think, going through multiple surgeries, and eventually he aquired another trolling boat, and we crossed tacks catching salmon.....

The state settled a hugely costly lawsuit, and seems to have expunged all traces of the details from the internet. I have not found one article mentioning this. But you might be able to find something in law libraries.

I also knew a man who was machine gunned on Attu or Kiska island during WWII, and sorted into the bury pile. Someone saw him move and they got him transported off the island. It took him a loooong time in hospital, but he recovered and went trolling for salmon, where I met him about 1975. Anomalies off of the bell curve... wind up as trollers?

[piller]

Medal of Honor Awardee Roy Benavidez was being zipped in a body bag and he spit in the face of the person doing the zipping just because that was all he could do to show he was still alive.