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It's amazing what the big bores will do. I was out pig hunting with my 458WM bolt gun earlier this year and had a mixture of loads, ranging from sub-sonic lead (good rabbit load) to "normal" 500gn FMJ loads. After getting a couple of pigs, and heading back to the car, I tried out some of the FMJs on inanimate objects.

I shot a large rock, which disintegrated, and found a chunk of the fired projectile - it had blown apart. It was too hot to hold in my hand, even after the minute it took me to find it.

I then shot at a 5" tree branch with another 5" branch behind it, expecting that the second branch would allow me to find the spent projectile - wrong! The projectile went straight through both without any signs of expanding, but I guess they are not meant to, are they?

(Note: I made sure I had a safe background in both cases before I did this. The rock was in the bottom of a dried up section of waterway - I fired down into it, and there was a far side steep sided creek bank behind the tree that was inaccessible for me to try and recover that projectile, I didn't bother looking for it but probably should.)

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Great fun doing this sort of stuff and you're right, need to have a good, safe, certain backstop. Behind that tree the ground rises sharply upwards. The is the shooting lane we have been using since 1963. The amount of gilding meal, brass, bronze and copper in that hill must be nearing a ton