Hi Wannabe:

That's a nice piece of lumber on that rifle of yours! My thoughts with the Rigby vs the Lott follow along similar to your line of reasoning. The Lott to my mind is a 100 yard kind of rifle. The 500 grain bullets in a DG scenario lose juice at the end of their short rainbow arching trajectory, and the light for caliber bullets have very poor BC and super thin jackets/light construction and just won't effectively reach out too far either. Nothing wrong with that, but one must respect it.

The Rigby can perform on DG with the heavier for caliber 400 grain bullets, and could be applied at distance with a 300 grain TSX or some such other reasonable quickly driven higher BC light(er) bullet. I don't think the Lott has this type of versatility. The Lott has the advantage of being able to consume the ubiquitous .458 Win Mag in the event the airlines mess with one's luggage containing the ammo. I don't know for sure, but I expect the Rigby ammo will be very hard to find in Africa, and likely impossible to be present anywhere nearby any remote bush camp. There was allegedly only a handful of .416 Rigby rifles made originally, and the Rigby is much more a recent phenomenon with quite limited availability comparatively.