![]() Time and again I’ve shot game from 1,500-pound buffalo to 25-pound coyotes with bullets carrying anywhere from 1,500 to 5,000 foot-pounds of energy. Is it alert or sleepy? Healthy or weak? Active and agitated, high on adrenaline? Shot through the heart, one critter runs off, another merely continues browsing and a third falls dead instantly. One theory has it that a hit to the chest when the heart is beating and systolic pressure is peaking has the greatest hydraulic effect. And a third problem is when the bullet strikes. Shoulder muscle and bone initiate a lot more friction and expansion than soft lung tissue. How do you build a bullet to handle all that? Another part of the problem is where the bullet lands. But at some distance downrange the 300 magnum slows to less than 30-30 velocity at 10 yards. at 100 yards hits a lot harder than the same bullet from a 308 Winchester. A 150-grain projectile from a 30-378 Wby. Part of the reason is variable impact velocity. Thus, bullet energy is dumped inside the animal for maximum knockdown effect. One popular theory postulates that a bullet should expand just enough to maximize tissue contact but not so much that it passes through the animal. This is why bullet makers swamp us with so many variations on the theme: soft lead, hard lead, thick jackets, tapered jackets, bonded jackets, sectioned and walled jackets, monolithic copper hollow points - they try various materials and constructions to control how much and how quickly hunting bullets expand and how much mass they retain for deep penetration. Excessive mushrooming leads to minimized penetration, as explained in this blog we published earlier. Enter the soft nose, hollow nose, expandable nose and break-away nose designs, all made to increase bullet area to damage more tissue and transfer more energy. Regardless its speed, it penetrates with precious little frontal area for transferring energy. Most of us know that a solid bullet, the kind mandated for warfare but illegal for big game hunting, zips through a body about like a target arrow. (The Elmer Keith, Jack O’Connor feud.) The high-velocity, hydrostatic “shock” challenge is converting bullet energy into an effective destructive force every time, and bullet construction has a lot to do with that. In fact, game often runs off, merely wounded, leading legions of hunters to reject high velocity cartridges and stick with big, slow bullets. Yet his high velocity cartridges didn’t and still don’t floor game fairly struck every time. So Weatherby was knocking at the right door. At 3,300 fps, a 115-grain bullet from a 257 Weatherby Magnum, Roy’s favorite, is packing a heap of shock energy. If you double the mass of a projectile, you double its energy, but if you double its velocity, you quadruple its energy. Some basic rules of physics are at play here. Weatherby sold big rifles and big cartridges that sent bullets crashing into game at velocities so extravagant beasts collapsed as if unplugged. Roy Weatherby didn’t coin the “shock” theory, but he did a brisk business around it. Weatherby Magnum cartridges have been famous for doing this. The bullet transmits its energy to the animal's blood, tissues and bones, sending high pressure waves to various organs, including the central nervous system, i.e. ![]() Hydrostatic shock or hydraulic pressure shock are other names for the phenomenon. At least that’s what’s been claimed these past 70 years or so. Why does any shot to the chest sometimes result in instant death when the central nervous system wasn’t touched? I know there might be a leg bone connected to a hip bone, a hip bone connected to a back bone and a back bone connected to a head bone - but there’s no lung bone connected to anything. The 150-grain flat-nose had smacked it in the central chest cavity. But every now and then a post-mortem reveals a lung, heart or even kidney strike. ![]() Whenever I see something like this, I assume my bullet struck the animal’s central nervous system. ![]() It dropped in mid-leap, never to stir again. A whitetail “button buck” dashed past about 50 yards out. Such a shocking event happened in front of my 30-30 Winchester M94 way back in 1968. While most game expires from bullet wounds due to hemorrhaging, shocking bullet performance sometimes drops it like a bolt of lightning. ![]()
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