It's very ethical to shoot deer in the heart/lungs area. The deer is already dead on it's feet, whether it's this very moment, or an eternity later, which is realistically about 10-12 seconds in hunting time, while it runs 50-125 meters before it loses blood pressure and drops. I think there's a certain subset of "special" individuals that figure if it's not a bang/flop, it wasn't as effective. Dead is dead.
Any hunting bullet between 150gr and 180gr will drop that deer no problem.
A cup & core will do fine, .308's aren't fast enough to warrant a premium bullet.
Was this an Interlock or Interbond maybe ?
I may have killed a critter or two with partitions but that VAST majority of game I have taken has been with Hornady interlocks. While I have not the experience of many here, I can say that I have only failed to get a one shot kill 4 times that I can recall. Shot a bear with my flint, heard a solid hit but never found the bear, a shot on a mule deer with the flint, clean miss, another bear that I shot three times with my flint to put him in park and a whitetail that took three shots with my flint.338, 225 Hornady. First shot was in the engine room and WAS a kill shot, forgot to tell the deer that and it ran off. Tracked for maybe 56/60 yards, found it and took a shot and grazed it, it ran another maybe 80-100 yards and I shot it behind the ear. Every other animal ive shot hsve been one shot kills with Hornady interlocks.
There are many resources to assist in your quest.
Vortex Viper 1-6 LPVO . No overscoping for me.As others have suggested, at 308 velocities, cup and core will do just fine. Your gun will preferentially tune to a given bullet weight (150, 165, or 180 grains) for accuracy, but at 50 yards this is irrelevant. Your 165 gr Sierras are a good choice.
More important is your ability to shoot quickly and effectively at 50 yards - can you hit a 8 inch pie plate shooting freehand? Shooting deer at this distance gets much more manageable if you have a low power scope (eg 1.5 to 3x). Most novice hunters show up at our Ontario hunt camp with way too much scope, thanks to the sales staff at Cabelas.
Once you have a load that works and your rifle is sighted in, there is no good reason to shoot from a rest if you are developing hunting skills.
When it comes to practicing to improve one’s hunting ability, I disagree. Off hand skills transfers to shooting from a rest, skills gained by shooting from a rest do not necessarily transfer to off hand shooting. An example of this happened in the late 70’s or early 80’s (pretty sure it was in the 70’s in Squamish BC. The local rifle shooters would routinely mock the muzzle loader guys and there archaic guns and challenged the black powder clue to a shoot off. Black powder guys agreed but only if it was an off hand shoot. At the end of it, the lowest muzzleloaders score beat the best suppository score because muzzleloader guys shoot off hand all the time and rarely if ever off a bench once load and sighting is done. Now, of course you would USE a rest if available when hunting but “practicing” from a rest for hunting is a waste of ammo IMO.
