I had a couple weeks free last summer, got to go to Texas and do some more "work" with a biologist and some ranchers down there. I can now pull a pig's tooth and get a sample of lung tissue with the best of them, and I was getting pretty good at getting samples from goats too. For the most part, this was control shooting, so unless I was curious I didn't put much effort into recovering bullets.

From previous experience I knew I didn't want to take a Mauser, magazine is too small. I arranged to borrow a sporterized jungle carbine (with a decent recoil pad). Ammo was loaded with the Privi 180 grain soft points. The rifle's owner loaded the ammo, I can get further load data if you need it.

The bullets worked fine on small pigs, but most bullets will. One (about 250# was shot head-on, bullet was recovered from one of the hind quarters, nicely mushroomed and weighed about 160 grains. I got five or six hogs that were >300 pounds, no problems with them. All the shots I took on larger hogs were aimed on a line through the chest at the off-side shoulder, and if I didn't hit the shoulder the bullets exited. Two bullets hit shoulders and were recovered, weights were about 145-155 grains.

I was asked to take a few other animals: a particular wildebeest, goats (they looked like a cross between meat goats raised by farmers and the Catalinas that hunters want), an impala if I saw a good one, any of the longhorns I thought were a threat, and don't shoot the camels. (I asked why the camels were there, but never got a straight answer.)

The bullets worked fine on the impala. I wound up taking 2, one shot each. One bullet exited after taking out the off-side shoulder, the other was through-and-through the chest.

No bullets were recovered from the goats. No matter what angle I hit, the bullets exited; the goats were just too-lightly built to stop them.

The wildebeest took two shots: one side-to-side through the chest but too high for a heart shot, the a stopper that hit the shoulder on my side. Core was still snug in the jacket, weight was about 140 grains. Other than a couple of coyotes, that second shot was the only one I took past about 125 yards.

All in all, I thought the bullets performed OK. They did as well as I would have expected from y limited past experience with Hornady's and Remington Core-Lokts. I'm still trying to acquire ownership of the rifle.