Is Bigger Always Better?
Armchair experts continually throw around terms like “energy transfer”, “energy dump” and “energy release”. Or brag how they could visually see the more pronounced effect of their bigger caliber. I am also a bit of an armchair ballistician, so this prompted me to look at the data I have collected during the last few seasons of buffalo we hunted, to see if I could confirm the perceived logic that bigger is better. I had always believed in Ruark’s “use enough gun…”
To compare apples with apples, I figured that we should focus on the first shot on a buffalo, as that remains the most important. I have excluded all buffalo where the client requested an automatic follow-up shot or fired second shots before the buffalo disappeared. I did not exclude obvious bad first shots by hunters. I only included buffalo that were hunted with expanding bullets, as I do not believe in solids for first shots on buffalo at all, and advise my clients against the use of such. Most of these buffalo were hunted under free-range conditions in Namibia’s Caprivi.
This left me with a sample of 66 buffalo, which I sorted into two caliber groups, those hunted with a 9.3 or a .375, and those that were hunted with a bigger caliber. I then split these two caliber
