I've never understood the attraction of shooting more with less when it comes to hunting...
Don't get me wrong, there are guys with relatively small calibers out there that are very effective. I'm not worried about those guys, but I do worry about rando people who will just get the smallest possible caliber "just cuz" and who have absolutely no idea what they're doing, punching tiny holes through game that will never be recovered.
anyone curious should just give it a shot(pun intended), until then they won't understand
bullet matters, nothing else, shot lots with .270 and .270 wsm with 140 accubonds then went to a 6.5 Grendel with 123 gr eld-m....break out the knife and guess which cartridge did what and you'd get it wrong every time, try to imagine for a second looking over a tiny grendel in your hand only burning 30 gr of powder and either 270 in your hand over top the carnage of dead critter internals with half to less than half the horsepower and you start to connect the dots on this, do more work where it counts, bullet does the work, the hp required drops to fractions of what the 20th century is used to, if you wish, but the big thing this allows is for people to do the absolute number 1 thing required in filling a tag and that's hit them where you want to hit them
gimme new 10 guys with new .22 arc 88 gr eld'm's vs 10 guys with 338 rum's they've had for 15 years and will see who's freezers fill up first, assuming everyone can get on game equally, this isn't a 'better hunter' conversation, hypothetical, the newbs with pea shooters will not be scared of their guns and have bad habits develop, they will be as likely or more to place it well than anyone running 'magnum' on their head stamp regardless, all guides seem to confirm, more rodeos happen not from the guys with 'not enough gun' but the guys showing up with 'too much gun' (specifically magnums, the higher hp you go up, worse it gets)
the other thing about this is the newbs running the 88gr eld'm's will walk right up to everything they shoot at lol vs even the ones that do happen to get hit where wanted with the rum's assuming delayed controlled expansion 20th century marketing bullets 100 yard runners,
so question is do we want newbs with pea shooters with good heavy for cal rapid expansion high bc/sd bullets or newbs with magnums????? lmao
try to wrap head around this one and only thing....bullet does the work, most important thing behind placing the bullet, aaaaaand THAT'S THE GAME!
LESS IS MORE! LOL