Everyone stating that a bow only produces less than a 100 pounds of energy and that a 243 produces more. Well you are comparing apples to oranges. A bow uses its energy for penetration and cutting causing massive blood loss. Where a bullet uses its energy to cause massive damage by the energy it releases and the shock it produces. My wife this year had a cow elk tag and she usually uses a 6.5x284 as her go to rifle. Well we moved this year and have had no room to reload in our tiny apartment, and ammo is way to expensive for that rifle and I wasn't about to buy any ammo for it. So we decided to use our 243 with 100 grain Nosler Partition. My wife shot a cow elk at 30 yards right behind the shoulder an absolute perfect shot and the bullet blew right through the cow. We watched the cow run off up the hill and then about 30 sec later she came running down the hill all wobbly legged and crashed 50 yards from us. Well we waited about 10 minutes gathering up our stuff and giving each other high fives. We started walking up to the elk and we were about 15 yards away and the cow jumped up and ran off. Well I immediately thought this isn't good. I decided it was a lethal hit and we would give the elk more time. We hiked 2 miles back to the truck and got my pack frame and hiked back in all it took us about 2 hours to get back with the pack frame to where my wife shot the elk. We started tracking the elk and had gone about 100 yards and we were seeing a decent amount of blood, when I heard an animal take of running. I got my wife in front of me and we were able to get to an opening and were lucky enough to see the cow standing in a opening about 50 yards away quartering away slightly and my wife fired and the elk ran off stumbled and went down for good. Upon further inspection of the elk when gutting it it had a perfect dime size hole through the lungs and about a quarter size exit hole so that tells me the bullet opened up. I came to the conclusion that there just wasn't enough energy and damage caused by the 100 grain Nosler Partition, and this elk suffered because we used a 243 on a elk, which I will never do again. Now a Moose is twice as large as a cow elk and I think your doing yourself an injustice to the animal by using a 243. Now a bow that is using a good broad head that has at least 55 pounds of kinetic energy would of killed my wife's elk with the same shot a whole lot faster than that 243 did. Just my opinion and experience.
Bookmarks