on_one_wheel wrote:At 500 meters its not hunting, it's taking pot shots, there's just too many variables to hold your head up high and call it ethical hunting.
Even with a cartridge that bucks the wind well like a .243, If your allowance for wind alone is out by as little as 1 meter per second it'll throw your shot 6 inches out, throw a little mirage into the equation just for fun, consider your retained energy had already halved at 500m so kiss goodbye to decent expansion or fragmentation... yeah .... nup
Now this is where the minute of pig is good enough theory comes to its crossroads.Say you have a MOA rifle of any given caliber cartridge combination and you center the crosshair, after doing your dope, on the billie goat or boar blissfully munching away at 500 metres. But you make an error in wind of one MOA and fire the shot. The bullet drifts 5.5 inches beyond your dope plus possibly half the MOA the rifle holds, so a added possible drift of 8.25 inches if the shot fired was of the outer extremity of the rifles group potential and in the downwind side. Conversely if it was the shot extremity on the upwind side it hits 2.75 inches or half MOA downwind of the crosshair but good enough that you hit the lung heart area as opposed to the gut shot. This is where and why load development with all the good procedures is necessary to minimise human error by compensating with rifle precision. A half MOA grouping rifle in this same scenario still hits in the vitals.