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Dunno.

I usually stay out of these types of discussions around here because I have no personal experience shooting elephant. Of course, if a guy got on a forum and proclaimed anything like expertise on deer after shooting 1 or even a half dozen he wouldn't be taken very seriously, so "no personal experience" shouldn't handicap me too much I guess.

I'll toss my two bits in here, since they aren't my two bits, but rather what I was told by a couple fellows with what I would call rather heavy experience on elephant.

Years ago I spent time with a fellow who did control work for, at first the Belgian, then Congolese governments in Zaire/Congo. Most of the elephant he shot were singles making mayhem of village and farm life in various parts of Katanga/Shaba province. Sometimes he shot groups, I think smallish groups. He started with a .375 and later got a .458, and though he liked the .375, he told me that he favored the .458 as he felt it killed somewhat noticeably better than did the .375. He also told me there wasn't really anything called overkill on elephant, only overkill in regards to what a man can handle in gun weight and recoil. He did not know how many he had killed in total but it was many hundreds and his son verified that, he himself having shot quite a few also though not as many as the old man.

I spoke more to his son than to him about the work, and his son felt the .375 was a good elephant caliber for all the reasons many have stated in the past, one of the most important being that it was much easier to hit with than was the .458. This from a fellow who was shooting hippo with Pop's .458 off a dugout canoe when he was 14!!

Everybody can say what they want, but shooting the big ones repeatedly {say, 10-15 times at a stretch, fast, at moving and obscured targets} is something very few can do well. And everyone can theorize that shooting a group of elephant involves one-shot-kill after one-shot-kill, but that is a goal not at all obtained in the field with total regularity. My friends did not blow gas about being dead-eyes with every bullet launched.

The gist of it was that a fellow uses what he has, but what he has better be something he can hit very well with.

I always thought this whole line interesting, because old John Buhmiller, a rare American who shot quite a few pachy's, seemed to reinforce the point by hanging home-grown muzzle brakes on his home-grown plus-size bolt guns thus combining my old friend's like for the biggest with his son's reality check about hitting well with repeat shots.

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