IT WAS with some reluctance I chose the words ‘long-range’ in my title, due to certain perceptions this term has formed in the minds of many this past decade. The movie American Sniper triggered enormous interest in ultra-longrange shooting, and gave rise to a target-match sport involving highly specialized rifles and scopes for engaging targets out to 1 000m and beyond. As a result, scope technology became more sophisticated generally, and articles began appearing in American magazines telling of hunters taking what I would regard as irresponsibly long shots at game. Please understand that my use of the term ‘long-range hunting’ is not related to any of that.
The term ‘plains game’ also means different things to different people. During the ‘golden age’ of safaris, East African hunters applied the term ‘plainsgame’ to any non-dangerous game, including bushveld and forest-dwelling species – rendering it a misnomer. Nevertheless, the abundance of hunting literature emanating from East Africa had hunters the world over adopting this term and meaning. In this article, my use of the term ‘plains-game’ applies to those species generally inhabiting wide, open plains where there is little cover for stalking, thus longer shots become the norm. In southern Africa, such species generally
