If you think of an elephant's brain as an object about the size and shape of a loaf of rye bread, you will be about right. Now imagine that same loaf suspended within a 55 gallon drum, and you have about the same ratio as the size of an elephant's brain to the size of his skull.

There are no bulls eyes painted on the side of the drum to show where to shoot from any angle, and anybody telling you that a hunter with little or no experience shooting an elephant will be able to get it right every time, no matter how much he practices and visualizes, is living in la-la land.

W.D.M.Bell was the Peyton Manning of elephant hunters, but even Peyton has a bad day and gets intercepted occasionally. All I can say is that of the four elephants I have killed (all large bulls, and all but one with 70 lbs.+ of ivory per side) all were brian shots, and all went down at the shot, never to rise again. At the time, I was in my 30's, in great physical shape, and at the top of my form in shooting, both with a rifle and with a shotgun. Nevertheless, I would not want to repeat Bell's experiment with a small bore.

Remember, Bell was shooting for ivory. He was not interested in shooting only one bull from a herd. One of his justifications for using a small rifle was that it didn't alarm the rest of the herd, allowing him to make multiple kills from a single stand, like the buffalo hunters in the American West.

I am not making recommendations to anyone else. Anyone is free to shoot all the elephants he wants with a 6.5X54 Mannlicher Schoenauer, but I, personally, will be using my .500 NE, .500 Jeffery, .505 Gibbs or .577 if I ever have the opportunity to shoot an elephant again. I have always shot for the brain, but it was comforting to know that if my aim was less than perfect or my visualation of where to aim was slightly off, I had an insurance policy in the form of the powerful cartridge.