John, Your bullet did an excellent job for the low velocity. An LFN would have done the same thing.
Lloyd. Please get one thing straight. I never said an animal hit only in muscle would die as quickly as one hit through the vitals. What I said was that with the proper displacement velocity, the wound through muscle will be nearly as large as through the vital organs, and will cause rapid bleeding, more rapid than if hit with a high velocity rifle in most cases, and for sure, far more rapid than if hit with a bullet that wounds with a smaller diameter hole. The large diameter FAST BLEEDING wound will make recovery of the animal far more likely. I have hit a couple through the ham muscle only and saw them just lay down and stay there. Never have I seen this with high velocity explosive wounds, nor with small diameter wounding bullets.
As for all animals dying different. Yes, dramatically different if they are hit different, and sometimes quite dramaticlly different if hit with similar vital organ hits which produce a good wound channel. However, all game of a species has basically the same amount of blood, same heart and circulation system, and same lung capacity. Thus, if this system is hit with similar wounds placed where they take the system out, death comes very close to the same for each animal. To claim that there is nothing consistant to be expected is unscientific nonsense. ON THE AVERAGE, similar size wounds through the critical organs of similar sized animals will take them out at very close to the same speed. In my experiance, feral dogs, hundreds of them, deer, many of them and elk, only a half dozen go down almost instantly when hit with a DV of 100 to 125. I autopsy every animal I shoot, and have since I started hunting 55 years ago, and know the difference in kill speed depending on what the wound takes out. Many thousands of customers report the exact results I describe. What I report is very extensive field experiance of hunters who have no reason to report other than the results which they have gotten.
The reason I delved deeply into the notion that SWC shoulders cut bullet size holes in game, are because of two animals taken with SWC's which received such small wounds that only a fool would believe the 'shoulder cutting' myth after seeing the wounds. Both were with commercially reloaded SWC 38 special ammo with claimed velocity of 800 fps. Both I might add, long before I got into casting and the extensive experimentation which lead to starting up LBT. The first a tree squirrel shot through the ribs, spun around on the limb he was setting on and hung on for maybe a minute before he finally fell. The wound looked like it had been made by an ice pick. Barely visable. Some time after this my young son shot a nice buck, which dropped in it's tracks. His first deer, and he was far enough away from me that I didn't hear his shot. He hunted me down to help dress it out, and by time we got back to the deer it was very dark, so we worked by starlight only, and boned it out, because it was too far to drag it to camp. We couldn't see the bullet wound in the dark of coarse, but boned it carefully, and when we got to camp, under good light, never did find a piece of the meat with a visable wound. He said the deer was looking at him and he aimed for the chest. I don't know where the bullet hit, but we boned it CLEAN, and couldn't find any bloodshot meat or with a hole. I will state for a fact that the SWC shoulder had to be rubbing flesh all the way through with that load, and that it probably wasn't moving the bullets at the advertised speed. I had no way of knowing because I didn't have a chrono then.
There will be no more argument or debate to the contrary in this post, because debate and speculation have no place against MASSES of scientific field reports. I've had nearly 30 years of unrefuted performance reports from customers. May I suggest that if any of this long debate has you wondering what is right, just do some calculating of displacement Velocity for whatever hard cast bullets you have on hand, making sure you understand my formula and what I am saying it means. Then do some performance testing of your own. On water jugs, watching the explosion differences on impact, or on game. While doing all this, keep in the back of your mind. Just maybe there is a reason why all jacketed hunting bullets made in the USA are designed to expand and present a wide frontal area as they penetrate. And just maybe, frontal area of a nonexpanding bullets nose is even more critical!
