270 Winchester for bull elk
- Thread starter todbartell
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I strongly urge you to read Jack O'Connor's "The Hunting Rifle" and, if you can get your hands on it, "The Big Game Rifle". I have a copy of the former and can lend it to you next time you are in town. It will tell you all you need to know: the .270 Winchester is the best.
About "The Hunting Rifle":
Don't say I never did anything for you.
Why do we need first hand experience? If reading a book helps, then reading the internet also helps.
I cannot understand some people (with a lot first hand experience) despise the knowledge from the internet. Trust me, I get more from the internet than from the real hunting experiences (of mine and others)
I can only assume you are fairly young if the internet is more important to you than your experience. When you get to the point that you realize the internet is NOT nearly as reliable as a source of truth as is actual hunting experience, you will be ..... well ...... older.
The trouble with the anonymous internet is that everyone can claim to be an expert. Writing a book requires at least some experiences that can be "fact checked" if people want to do it, so before you write a book you should shoot some game. On the internet forums it can take some considerable experience to be able to spot the clues that someone has not really done much hunting. If someone uses words like "always", or "never", or the old "DRT", or "knock down power", or "head shots", or anything else that indicates never making mistakes or missing, you can begin to doubt the advice being offered. As my grandfather once said to me after he heard me moaning about how I couldn't understand why I missed a shot I had just missed, "If you ain't never missed, you ain't done much shooting".
A .270 Win will kill any bull elk that walks if used correctly. My own preference is to leave the .270 at home and use the .300 Win for elk, and that is simply because I think it's a better elk cartridge, not because the .270 won't work. I use my framing hammer for framing work too. Sometimes a bit bigger is actually a bit better, but lots of nails get set properly with 16 oz. hammers too. Especially if the guy swinging it knows how to do it.
A .270 may be fine for moose but everyone knows they die a lot easier than elk - moose just lay down in the bush if you put a shot through the boiler room. Western elk live in the mountains and will just run downhill because it requires less effort and they can run for miles unless you shoot directly into the crease behind their front leg. If you are hunting out east you need to be a lot more careful with caliber selection because coastal elk (like the ones in Labrador) have a much tougher hide and thicker hair because of the harsher environment near the ocean and the exposure to salt and coy wolf hybrids. The problem with a .270 is that it is a small bullet moving at high speed - if you use anything other than a Nosler Partition you are going to have bullets blow up on the hair and hide. What you want is a large bullet with a flat meplat going around 2500 fps - this will give you a lot of frontal area to impart shock while staying supersonic out past the 300 yds. Also make sure you use jacketed bullets - copper jackets and solids were developed for hunting. Cast lead bullets were designed for target shooting only and can never be ethically used on an animal as they are too soft to penetrate properly and will pencil a small hole through without expending all their energy. What you need is a bullet that will penetrate the hide and then blow up in the body cavity expending all it's energy on target.
The point here is that if you have never read a book, or gained any experience in the field, or spent time with some old timers at your gun club or in a hunt camp, if you have never gained experience or learned from the stories of success and failure of your predecessors -- you may not know that all of the above is complete horse####. Experience is the knife that carves bull#### away from reality
The point here is that if you have never read a book, or gained any experience in the field, or spent time with some old timers at your gun club or in a hunt camp, if you have never gained experience or learned from the stories of success and failure of your predecessors -- you may not know that all of the above is complete horse####. Experience is the knife that carves bull#### away from reality
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Lol can't really argue with that... However, experience is only one way to gain knowledge, and all the experience in the world is worth very little if you don't learn from it. Alternatively, you can learn a lot without ever going hunting, if you know how to research a topic and filter out what is a good source vs a bad one. Critical thinking, methodical research, and a finely tuned bull#### detector can get you pretty far in most things..
People like to rag on me because I'm poor (I use a savage axis because it's what I could afford) and inexperienced(this is only my 4th or 5th season hunting), but I've learned more in my few years doing this than some people who've been at it for decades because I'm always actively looking for new things to learn about, for me education is a life long journey, and currently my biggest hobby is firearms/hunting so I've spent a lot of time researching this stuff.
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RJ
BigUglyMan
CGN Ultra frequent flyer
- Location
- New Scotland
Mark's been stirring the pot since Before the Crash...the first crash!
It's August...everyone is getting a little cabin fever waiting for hunting season to start.
In actual fact you want to hit the sunny side of the elk for best results. Bullets kill by letting light inside the animal.
Suther I understand you are just playing the victim, but no one is mocking you for being poor or inexperienced. We are ribbing you for presenting secondhand knowledge as first hand and giving advice on things you have never experienced . Some unsolicited advice from me is not to take this attitude of “reading others experience “ = experience worthy of sharing into your career in consulting...
When did I ever say something was first hand experience when it wasn't? I don't need to have first hand experience to form an opinion... Nobody here has first hand experience running a country, but we all have opinions on how poorly Trudeau is doing it...
That and perhaps resisting the urge to take a swing at others who might as well be in a different universe.
