Stopping Power Revisited
by Ganyana
http://www.african-hunter.com/stopping_power.htm

"In all the sitreps I have been able to look up where a hunter has been surprised by an elephant in thick bush, the 11 cases where the hunter has been armed with a .375 he has been either injured or killed. As the rifles become more powerful, the odds improve remarkably. A .470 (or .465, 476 etc.) gives the hunter better than 50/50 odds of escaping unscathed (eight records: one killed, two injured). With buffalo it’s a similar story. A .375 solid on a frontal chest shot will seldom stop a charge dead. Both barrels from a .500 are virtually guaranteed to."

"This then is the down side in the argument for smaller calibres; when things go wrong and you get charged, you always wish that you had a rifle at least twice as powerful as the one you are holding. The debate then for carrying a cannon is one of ethics and safety and so we come back to the argument for having a rifle that possesses some real stopping power."

"Most PH’s I’ve spoken to would rather see a client pulling an old .375 out of his gun bag than any new .450 magnum any day. In fact, most PH’s would rather have the client use a rifle smaller than the legal minimum (9.3 x 62 in Zimbabwe) if that is all he can shoot straight with. A 220 grain solid from a 30-06 through an elephant’s brain or a buffalo’s shoulder is a thousand times more lethal than a 900 grain bullet from a .600 express that misses the brain or hits the buff in the guts. There is no substitute for shot placement!"