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I have no experience hunting elephants, but Taylor's assertions about this or that round stunning an elephant for this or that amount of time have been the kingpins in my personal belief that he was for the most part a fraud.

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Hmmm.

While I would agree with the view that you cannot mathematically compute how long an elephant will be knocked unconscious by a given round, I would say that using the Taylor index for relative impact on elephant is a good starting point. Some people with a fair amount of elephant hunting experience agree.

I also think it is too easy to bash those who are not alive to defend themselves, like Taylor or Capstick.

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I am not suggesting that there is no difference in power between the various elephant rounds. It is obvious that there is.

As for it being easy to bash the dead, I don't think so. Dead heroes commonly have devotees who oftimes are far more defensive of the hero's views than the hero was. It's just that when you read of Taylor's travels, the actual amount of time he spent in the field and the known times he wasn't hunting or lived in Africa but didn't own guns, was going here or there dodging the authorities, was back in Eire, etc, it becomes obvious to me that he couldn't have actually done all he said he did in regards to calibers used and elephants slain.

I do believe he had pretty wide hunting experience. Not sure how to quantify that.

But my point isn't that he did have or didn't have general hunting experience. My point is that his assertion that this round or that round will produce a known "knock out time" {read the book, he says it, and hangs minutes on each round} is ridiculous and I have never read of or spoken to one hunter with substantial elephant hunting experience who agrees with Taylor's rigid and silly timings. As mentioned in this thread, for one thing, comparing close-but-missed shots is very difficult. His general KO principles seem about right but as Mike LaGrange has pointed out, his math was wrong even if his general ideas were right. But seriously, creating a sliding scale that says the .600 NE is a better "Stopper" than a 9.3x62 doesn't seem like it demands the mind of Niels Bohr or the experience of Tony Sanches-Arino.

In death as in life he was a controversial character, to be sure!

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