My experience with mono metal bullets for hunting

Over the last couple of years I’ve been playing with copper ammunition and testing its effectiveness on different animals in Alaska. I grew up shooting the good ol’ Remington core-lokts for mule deer and whitetails and wanted to have something that penetrated deeper and retained more of the bullet as it travelled through the animal. Here are my thoughts from several successful harvests.

For starters, I’m shooting my dads old Remington 700 chambered in 30/06. The gun is completely original from when my dad bought it in the 70s, including the Leupold scope. It’s nothing fancy, but it gets the job done. The ammunition I’ve been using is the 180 grain Hornady CX bullet out of their Outfitter line.

The first animal I harvested with the CX bullet was a blacktail deer. I took a hard quartering away shot at 125 yards. In an effort to tuck the shot behind the shoulder, I shot just a touch too tight and busted through the right rear quarter, penetrated through the body cavity into the chest, broke through the left front quarter and found my bullet almost completely intact and mushroomed. The buck didn’t go far and left a great blood trail to follow. I was pretty impressed by the outcome.

I’ve harvested two forked horn bull moose with the bullet. Both were at roughly 20 yards and one was shot completely through a wall of brush. The first was completely broadside and the entrance and exit slipped between ribs without touching bone. The second was quartering to me and I shot behind the right front shoulder, through the body cavity and found my bullet just inside the hide in front of the left rear quarter without touching bone. The bullet was mushroomed and only a small fragment broke off, which I later found in the rear quarter.

Both moose coughed and breathed heavy as they took off, but neither made it more than 70 yards from the shot and neither had much external bleeding that would make for an easy blood trail. The internal damage was impressive, vaporizing lungs and causing major internal bleeding. But tracking was done by following a general direction of travel and disturbed vegetation.

A large black bear that I harvested this spring was standing perfectly broadside at 70 yards. I put the crosshairs about halfway down his body left to right and up and down. The bear folded at the shot and took a moment to get back before running another 30 yards into the brush. He left a foot-wide trail of blood and destroyed vegetation behind him. The entrance hole was small, but the exit had split a rib and had caused massive external damage that left the great blood trail. The internal damage was devastating as well.

Most recently were the three blacktail bucks I harvested last month. The first was shot broadside at 150 yards downhill behind the left front leg. I watched the buck rear and take off, stumbling forward and dying within 60 yards of the shot. The shot was perfect, but the exit must have clipped the right front shoulder blade as I had to leave a little bit behind from the meat damage. He left a very impressive blood trail.

The second was my long poke that I wrote about last week at what was probably 170 yards. I put the crosshairs in the middle of his neck and put a finger-sized hole through it. The buck dropped instantly and surprisingly caused very little meat damage despite hitting bone and muscle.

The third buck I shot broadside as it was trotting at 30 yards. The buck began trotting off after the shot and I didn’t think I had hit him. We crested over the rise he had disappeared over and found a path of red blood on the snow leading from the shot to where he was piled up only 70 yards away. The exit on that buck had also hit a rib and caused massive external damage and the resulting blood trail.

So what have I learned? If you put the bullet in the right spot, it’ll do exactly what it was designed to do, and that is kill. It seems to do a lot of internal damage that kills effectively and quickly. My best blood trails are from exit wounds only if the bullet hits bone on the way out. The lack of blood from a clean hit with no bone contact is the only issue I’ve had. I’ll keep shooting these for now as I see no reason to change.