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The Big Bores, .458" and above, shine for elephants. If more than a couple elephants are in your future, start in thr .458" range. Perhaps with the 450NE 3 1/4", for which Hornaday is already making bullets with loaded ammo and brass due out this summer, or the 470NE, loaded by Federal and others, with Hornaday gearing up also.

If you don't see many elephants in you future, lesser cartridges are probably the better choice, with maybe the 450/400 the best choice - if you can find one at 9 1/2lbs or less. No need to hump alot of weight for that level of recoil and performance.

Reasoning:

Elephants are relatively easy to turn with a less than perfect brain shot with a heavy bullet, this from long history and recent history as well. See for example the Zim study that found 1.) most attacks came from not the ele hunted but a companion ele, and 2.) a great majority of hunters using a less than .458" rifle were seriuosly injured - ussually killed - but 50% of hunters using .458" + rifles escaped serious injury. You can find an article reviewing this study somewhere on the African Hunter Magazine website, though I have trouble finding it from time to time.

History also teaches that buffalo are relatively difficult to turn without a perfect brain or spine shot so a close miss with a big bore is little advantage to a close miss with a smaller rifle. Given this situation, why pay the price in recoil and weight?

Mac implies that Taylor relied on the 450/400 for elephants, but this is not the fact. Taylor explicitly states that he killed the great majority of the elephants he killed, I recall that he quoted 75%, with the 450NE No2 and the 500/450, prefering the former cartridge but prefering the H&H rifles in the later cartridge because "they average a pound lighter". Next up was the 500/465, also an H&H proprietary round.

Taylor did not like the 470 because of the greater ogive of the Kynoch 470 bullets, which he found to often stray from straight line penetration. Not a noteworthy factor with today's bullets, imo.

Moreover, Taylor describes the ideal elephant hunter's battery as consisting of a medium bore magazine rifle, aka bolt rifle, for more open opportunities - of which there are few today, the 450 class for heavy brush and a 577 or 600 for really thick cover and for following wounded eles.

Taylor contradicts himself quite a bit, though, for example with the 450/400 bit and also saying that a pair of Westley Richards rifles, a bolt and a double in 425wr would make a perfect set with the addition of a 577 +. (The bit about the 425wr is heresy to the double rifle crowd since the cartridge is both "rimless" and has a rebated rim to boot. For more heresy, Taylor liked the WR single trigger!) So rather than put much weight on some of Taylor's later pandering to his sponsors, it is more realistic to rely on what Taylor did in practice, which is rely day to day on the 450 class for elephants.

But Taylor did believe that the 450/400 was the perfect buffalo cartridge.

My personal experience tells me that for the most fun hunting buff, hunt with an open sighted double rifle of whatever cartridge is legal, but if you are a horn hunter, more interested in the tape measure than the fun of, frustrating at times, close stalking, hunt with a scoped bolt rifle - or perhaps a scoped double.

JPK

Edited by JPK (24/02/08 03:50 AM)

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