energy required
 

Ok I got to thinking about why a .223 isn' t considerd enough gun for whitetail deer and did a few calculations on bullet energy and big game animals. What I came up with is pretty interesting. Looking at these numbers why do we need so much bullet weight and energy to kill a whitetail deer? The 223 produces more weight per pound and energy per pound than any of the other cartriges. This is assuming that you use a properly constructed bullet in the 223. What makes a cape buffalo so much easier to kill than a whitetail.;)

This is how I got these figures:
weight of bullet divided by weight of animal = grains per pound of animal

grain per pound of animal (velocity squared)
_____________________________________ = foot pounds per pound of animal
450400



2000# cape buffalo, 416 Rigby, 400 gr bullet @ 2400 fps. = .2 gr of bullet per pound of animal and 2.56 ftlbs per pound of animal

1200# moose, 338 win mag, 225 gr bullet @ 2750 fps. = .188 gr of bullet per pound of animal and 3.15 ftlbs per pound of animal

600# elk, 300 win mag, 180 gr bullet @ 2900 fps.= .277 gr of bullet per pound of animal and 5.17 ftlbs per pound of animal

150# whitetail. 270 win, 130 gr bullet @ 3000 fps. = .867 gr of bullet per pound of animal and 17.32 ftlbs per pound of animal

150# whitetail, 223 rem, 70 gr bullet @ 2900 fps. = .467 gr of bullet per pound of animal and 8.71 ftlbs per pound of animal.

RE: energy required
 

The answer is no. I will say that a larger bullet with more energy will kill them faster and that is why larger calibers are used. I have tracked many animals (to far) shot with smaller calibers. I lost some and found some. I could not tell if it was because of not enough gun or not enough shooter. I own a 7mm Rem. Mag. and have never had one run more than 10' . I " probably" could have shot them with a 223 and have the same results, but I personally would not chance it nomatter what the numbers say. I shoot a 150 gr bullet and feel a 70 gr is to light to shoot at that size animal.
To the best of my knowledge the 223 cartridge was designed for the military to wound people so it would take two other soldiers to drag the wounded person. This would take three people out of action instead of one.

RE: energy required
 

Yes I know that the bigger the bullet the faster it will die. To get the same numbers on a 2000# cape buffalo that your 7mm mag would have on a 150# whitetail you would need a 1866 grain bullet traveling at 3000 fps. That would give a muzzle energy figure of 37,286 foot pounds.

RE: energy required
 

Your thinking to much :D

RE: energy required
 

I know someone that uses a .223 for deer. They had venison this year!
ACCURACY IS WHAT IT REALLY COMES DOWN TO!!

RE: energy required
 

i have used a 223 and i had an uncle and his friend both use a 223 this yr. in fact his doe he shot droped faster than the buck i shot with my 30-06 with 165 grain. i hit in the just behind the heart. he hit the heart. droped the deer my buck ran(or should i say stumbled) 5-10 yrds. like pahunter86 said just depends on the accuracy

RE: energy required
 

I know someone who shot a deer with a .223 the deer was still alive after the two hours we spent tracking it. My friend shot it with my 7mm and killed it. When i looked at the body the 223 shot went through both lungs and hit the side of the heart. I would have to say that the bigger the calibur the better. I use a 30-06 Rem. and I havent had any problems.

RE: energy required
 

I used a 222 for my first deer rifle and the biggest whitetail I have to date fell to that caliber. Lost a few deer too!

The flaw in your logic is that the total weight of the animal in question has little to do with how much force it takes to bring it down. The thickness of the hide, muscle, rib bones, shoulder bones, overall anatomy, etc controls what it takes to make a clean kill.

As anyone that has used a 222/223 for deer hunting will tell you: it is an adequate caliber for limited range and perfect double lung heart shots. It is inadquate or marginal in most of our hands. It is certainly inadquate for me.

RE: energy required
 

Bigbulls, if you have this much time on your hands could you stop over to my house and clean my garage out? :)

RE: energy required
 

I know, I' m not working right now. About to start attending Colorado School of Trades so I have too much time right now. I did manage to get out and catch the first trout of the season today. [:-] I' ll pay for it tomorow when I can' t walk.:( Sorry I just got done cleaning mine out a couple of days ago. One' s enough for right now.:D

RE: energy required
 

I realy don' t want this to turn into a pissing match but the .223, .222. 221 fireball and .220 swift are not deer calibers. Yes you can kill a deer with one and you can kill a grizzly with a .22 short if you want to bad enough. Most states it is illegal to use under 6MM ie .243 cal. The reasons the larger calibers work better is bullet coefficent, retained energy and cross sectional area. This is an example I use for Hunter Ed. classes;

You have a Corvetee that goes 300mph and run into a building. Now you take the same building run into it with a Peterbuilt traveling a 100mph, which would cause the most damage and achive the most penetration. The Peterbuilt would. Why? Because the corvetee would break down, and lose all it' s energy in a very short distance where as the Truck would plow through and causing massive internal damage and possibly a pass through. Lighter weight balls lose thier energy faster. Pure Physics.

Accuracy is a very important element in any hunting sittuation, But it' s only a portion of the whole picture. You can blow a shot with a .600gr 45/70 just as quick as you can with a 90gr .223 but there is much larger margrine for error with the large caliber. By this I mean if you have a high wind say 20-25mph blowing left to right how much farther to the left do I need to hold the .223 than the larger calibers. Like I said; this is what my opinons are and that' s my nickel' s worth.

RE: energy required
 

Your theory is sound.....sounds like something a politician would say that is!! This coming from the guy who once convinced a group of college faculty that riding a bike is more dangerous than riding a bull. Ain' t statistics wonderful!!!

For one thing, your model, as in all physics, uses an idealized environment and denys things that are vital to inclusion and includes things of slight fallacy.

Firstly, a .223 bullet is lucky to retain 60% of its mass upon exiting a coyote, while a .416 bullet used for CB' s are designed to retain 80% or better (and usually do unless a bone is impacted) of their mass. If both would stop in the body, 100% of the velocity is lost, while if the .223 loses 50% of it' s mass, it loses energy twice as quickly, but, truth be told, it' s much more quickly, since force=mass*velocity, if the velocity decreases by 50% per half-second, and the bullet fragments in half per half second, your energy after the first half-second is 1/4 of what you had upon impact. With a .416, losing 20% of it' s energy per half-second, and the same 50% of it' s velocity per half-second, the resultant energy at the end of the first half-second is 2/5 of the initial value, nearly twice that of the .223' s retention.

If you have a 70gr bullet (.00455Kg) @3000fps (914.4m/s), you yield 4.16Newtons (metric equivalent to ft.lbs.). A 400gr bullet (.026Kg) @2500fps (762m/s) you yield 19.8Newtons, so you have about 4 3/4 times as much energy in the 416rigby, no surprise, my tables have 70gr (.21BC)@3000fps at 1399ft.lbs. and a 400gr (.38BC) @2500fps at 5552ft.lbs., about 4 times the energy in the .416rigby.

What does damage in a high-powered round is the hydrostatic shockwave. If the energy is enough, the CNS will be vibrated to a point of shutting down, commonly known as knocking them in the dirt, the bullet will appear to simply knock them over and nothing moves (other than a small nervous twitch, but the game' s already dead). In both of these rounds used on these game animals, the energy isn' t enough to shut down the CNS, but the shockwave still does the damage. Shooting something with a high powered round is kind of like knocking over the first dominoe in a 1-2-3-4...etc pyramid, one knocks down the next two, and they knock down the next three, and the next four, etc. So, what really gets affected initially is dependant on the face area of the bullet, a .416 spire point bullet can easily have the same face area as a .223 wadcutter even, so the area effected by a round nosed bullet in used in each round would be 3.5times greater in the .416 (.136 vs .0391).

Now, a Cape Buff. might weigh 2000# and a white tailed deer might weigh 150# (both are fairly inaccurate, 2000# is a heck of a bull, and a 150# deer' s a greyhound with a rack or a two year old doe), but as far as it goes, the bullet doesn' t have to affect the entire body to do the deed. The only mass that must be affected is a straight line from the entry point to the vitals, not the tail, nor the nose. A bullet pushes a conical section of semi-viscous liquid (soft tissue). It' s a fair assumption that a cape buffalo is twice as deep to the heart, and I' d imagine that it' s maybe 1.5times as heavy per pound than a deer, even it it were 2 times as heavy per pound, the conical section of soft tissue that would have to be affected would be less than four times as heavy in a CB than in a deer, so with four times the energy and less than four times the mass, the more energy would reach the vitals of a CB than a deer.

So with a .223, you have a shattering bullet inflicting a quarter of the energy upon impact and exponentially decaying in energy every instant after impact, while with the .416, you might be pushing a bit more mass, energy retention is such that the penetration and hydrostatic shock is MUCH more with the big dog than the mouse-fart.

RE: energy required
 

energy is really a poor way to determine if a caliber is suitable for an animal.

I hunt deer most often, and have been fortunate enough to take them with a variety of calibers. Therefore, I' ll write about them because I feel that I know what I' m talking about:)

You kill a deer with damage, not energy. Therefore, the wider and/or deeper your wound canal is, the better.

A 223 has much more energy than a 357, yet the 357 will kill a deer faster (when fired from a rifle or pistol) at 50 yds. than a 223 b/c it will create a larger wound channel...more of what keeps the critter alive gets destroyed (organs) or lost (blood)

if you are looking for calibers that are very effective on deer, despite low energy, look at the:
(pistol or rifle)- 357mag, 44 spcl, 45 Colt, all with a heavy soft point or hard cast bullet

these calibers do a tremendous amount of damage out to 60 yds when fired from a pistol, and about 100 when fired from a rifle, with reletavely low energy