sakoBC wrote:I would suggest that the 12g gets a hard time due to poor shooting (which I have been guilty of) rather than any deficiencies in the cartridge. From my experience, if you hit a pig in the chest with buckshot at 10m-20m it’s not going far. Use Winchester Super Ranger no. 4s with the right choke and it’s hard to miss hares and rabbits at appropriate ranges.
How many of us regularly practice with a 12g at fast moving ground level targets? I would suggest very few (me included). So, you point your 12g in the general direction and miss/wound because you didn’t have any lead; shot too high; jerked the trigger and every other variation of operator error and suddenly the 12 gauge is a dud.
From my experience, the key to success with a 12g is the right ammo; right choke and plenty of practice. Few of us are prepared to put in the trigger time. Sure, it’s no good at long range stuff, but neither is a .22LR, but you won’t see many people dumping on the .22LR.
Sure, but if you hit a pig in the chest with any number of rifles you'd get the same result or better.
Shotguns are too much of a compromise in my opinion. You either have a small number of pellets that carry enough energy to do lethal damage, but reduce the number of hits to none, or you have a lot of smaller pellets that make lots of hits but lack any energy to penetrate or do enough damage. And because you're slinging such a massive amount of lead you can only push them fairly slow to still be comfortable to shoot, further reducing the energy at the target.
I think if you put in the practise you'll probably still get better results with a rifle.
The shotgun though is useful for learning to lead moving targets, but generally it's far better to shoot at your targets when they stop, even with a shotgun (a shotgun patterns very differently against stationary and moving targets due to the cone of shot - a target moving across the shot will be hit by either the front pellets or the rear pellets, but not all of them).
For survival where all that matters is that you end up with a feed they work great, especially under adverse conditions, but not for humane hunting.
