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LOL. Well said.

A LOT of elk here have been killed with the .30-30 for the obvious reason that for many years the gun was cheap and readily available. A friend used on with no problems at all. I'm sure some have been lost as well, and in truth, I personally would avoid it for elk and definitely for moose, tho I've read of many of them and of course big bear of both brown and white configuration being killed, too.

As a young hunter a friend called me up to help him with a deer he shot. As it turned out, he was sitting along a treeline and heard a shot, then some minutes later saw a buck leave the treeline and run toward him. He was using a Remington 700 in .30-06 topped with a Williams Guide peep sight. One shot took the deer down nicely. A few minutes after that, an out-of-breath kid packing a Marlin 336 popped out of the treeline as well, claiming the deer was his. A discussion took place and the kid gave up, apparently convinced he'd missed the animal. Later, when helping my friend skin it, I found a fresh wound on the animal's ham, invisible from the outside. We dug in and found a bullet up against the femur. Removing it and cleaning it off, I could see it was a .30-30 bullet fired from a Marlin as it clearly showed Micro-Groove rifling. Bullet was a little mushroomed but had only penetrated a few inches and simply stopped when contacting the rear leg bone. Deer didn't even notice it.

Many years later I shot a buck that was running away from me with a 6.5x55 and a 140 grain Prvi Partizan soft point. Bullet penetrated the rear ham, shattered the femur and we found it under the hide on the off shoulder.

I've often reflected on those two similar shots.

Anyway, my son and I have both used the .30-30 to kill smallish black bear but nothing else of game. I've used it on butcher sheep a bit and we have used the very similar-performing 7.62x39 for deer, coyotes and small varmints and consider it a very fine deer round with the 125 grain bullets we have used. Moral of the story being when used on game of the size of whitetails, I think the .30-30 {or rounds of it's type .32 Win, .30 Rem, 7.62x39, etc} is a fine round as long as one keeps to side shots.

As if that is a remarkable statement, seeings that millions of deer have been killed with the hoary old Dirty-Thirty!

So in Africa it would be fine on game of whitetail size, and there are a lot of critters that fit that category.

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