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The perfect hunting cartridge is in my opinion the cartridge the hunter is most experienced and confident in, and also which has adequate power and effectiveness for the job at hand.

In a modern consumer society people are always encouraged to buy the newest and latest, to "fix" so called "problems". "All effective magnum cartridges need to have a belt." "Any cartridge with a belt may have feeding problems." "The cartridge needs to be fat and have flat sides." "If it doesn't shoot well over 3000 fps it has a curved trajectory." "If it doesn't have the words Ultra, Super, Duper, it must be ineffective." And so many more stories.

And yet the .308, .30-06, .375 H&H and even the .458 Win Mag still kill well. The .458 did have some problems which better powders have fixed. But when it performs to .450 NE standards there is no problems with it.

We sometimes read of what the perfect hunting battery is in magazines. Nowadays it is usually this calibre or that, often duplicating each other. I remember on old magazine article which was a good one, and used different purposes as the reason - eg small meat game rifle, fast shooting brush rifle, alpine or plains flat shooting rifle, big game rifle etc. A much better way of looking at what is needed. Maybe a good idea for a new thread.

Regarding confidence, after my first cow elephant I had a lot of confidence with .450 NE DR. And rightly or wrongly felt it could handle most situations well. Experienced with it on smaller game (ie compared to elephants!) I had LOTS of practice "shooting" elephants in books, TV, videos, calendars, etc. Lining up brain shots from all angles. Whenever I saw an elephant on the calendar, TV documentary I calculated the angle, but tried to not say BANG when in mixed company.

I would guess Rigby will soon push again the .275 Rigby cartridge, 7x57 mm. While it will not send the world on fire being one of the oldest "modern" smokeless cartridges, I think serious hunters will have a re-look at it, if they don't have one already. Certainly the medium game animals of Europe, Africa, North America and even Australia have not become more armour plated.

The .256 / 6.5x54 Mannlicher-Schoenauer certainly is another cartridge to consider.

How often do we hear about people using a .270 Winchester these days. Even its "replacement" the 7mm Rem Magnum? (Other than JG here on NE ) At one time, if you didn't use these, you were a turkey!

Here on NE we often like the old and unusual, not the fads and most new BS kid on the block.

For medium game, really there is not much to choose from between a .270, 7x57, 7mm Rem Mag, 7x64, .308, .30-06, 8x57 etc and many others in that range. Some pluses or minuses in some of them, but all will kill the same animals with the right bullet and even more so the right bullet placement, which is often forgotten in the marketing hype.

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