Shoot’n, Fish’n ‘n’ Hunt’n

Just how accurate should your hunting rifle be?

You don’t need target rifle accuracy to hunt game, such as this red stag, and any rifle capable of 2MOA, or better, will do the job well – if you do your job well.

Introduction

It would seem that one of the least understood issues, when we buy and set-up a new hunting rifle, is the degree of accuracy that we should be looking for. For years, we hunters have been bombarded with articles, brochures, advertisements and videos from firearms manufacturers, ammunition makers and gun writers, all promoting and extolling the virtues of hyper accuracy. This situation reminds me of something that W. D. M. ‘Karamojo’ Bell wrote in “Bell of Africa”, and he was referring to the time of his first serious elephant hunting safari, just after the Boer War, when he stated:

One reason for Bell’s success, in the hunting field, was that he didn’t automatically follow what the gun-makers pushed in their advertising brochures. Instead, he developed his own practical appreciation for what he required, from his hunting rifles, including the level of accuracy.

Even in Bell’s time, the gunmakers were very active in trying to push their wares through brochures and catalogues and many, many hunters were duped into buying rifles and ammunition that were not the best choice for their purposes. Today, the pressure is even greater and, while the makers cannot be blamed for conducting such active advertising campaigns (after all, they need to make money), we do need to be careful not to be misled by all of this marketing material. If we were to believe every firearm or ammunition maker, about their latest and greatest toy, then we would be perpetually upgrading our rifles, optics and ammunition, at great expense, and we would never get to learn how to use any of them properly. We need to be like Bell and formulate, and back, our own opinions about what will work best for our own purposes.

If hunters don’t work out their own requirements, then they leave themselves at the mercy of all this aggressive advertising. The result can be spending inordinate amounts of time and money chasing performance and accuracy levels that are required on the target range, or on the battlefield, but which are totally, and utterly, superfluous in the hunting field. The simple fact is that you do not require a hyper-accurate rifle in order to hunt game and this article will discuss hunting rifle accuracy and how much accuracy is really required to ethically hunt game animals.

Ethical hunting requires that we ensure our firearms are suitable, of sufficient accuracy and that we conduct ourselves in a manner that achieves the best outcome.

Ethics and Hunting Rifle Accuracy.

To set the terms of reference, for this article, let me start by making an important definition as this article is only concerned with ethical hunting. Ethical hunting is the hunting of game, under fair chase rules, and by means that ensure clean and humane kills. This definition demands that ethical hunting be conducted within range limitations. The maximum range, that I would consider fits the definition of ethical hunting, is 360metres (400yards). This limitation is set by several factors:

First of all, very few of us can be certain of clean one-shot kills at ranges beyond 360m when shooting from typical hunting positions. Whether shooting across your pack, leaning against a tree, shooting from a sitting or kneeling position or even when using shooting sticks, clean one-shot kills at anything beyond 360m become very problematic. Indeed, many experienced hunters limit themselves to less than 230m (250yards) and there is a very practical reason for this limit and this will be discussed in the next article about Point Blank Range. True, you might be able to shoot further if you are in a prone position and shooting with the aid of high quality optics and a good bipod, but most hunting requires us to walk long distances and to stalk carefully in order to close with the game. This style of hunting is not generally conducive to the use of high powered optics, bipods or the prone position.

Secondly, very few HUNTING projectiles will open up and kill cleanly when the ranges start getting long. The average hunting bullet is good out to about 360m while some of the premium hunting bullets might be good out to around 550m (600yards). However, very few bullets will expand reliably, and therefore kill cleanly, beyond these ranges. The features that make a hunting bullet lethal, such as with hollow point, soft point or ballistic tip designs, are features that are counter-productive to long range shooting. It is a simple but unwritten law of ballistics that good hunting bullets make poor long range bullets and good long range bullets make poor hunting bullets. Yes, I know that there are people out there who claim otherwise, but I strongly suspect that they conveniently forget to mention their long range failures and the resulting wounded game that they lose.

Hunting bullets are fundamentally different to long range bullets and, for hunting,  lethality should take priority over range and accuracy.

How Much Accuracy for Hunting?

So now that we have set a range limitation, how much accuracy do we really need? To determine this, we need to look at our target species. Remember, this article is about hunting game animals and that does not include varmint size animals. Discussion on varmint rifle accuracy will be found in a future article. Here we are talking about animals starting with feral pigs and native hogs and moving up through the various deer, antelope and on to the big critters such as buffalo and the like. However, as the size of the vital area of all game animals is proportional to their overall size, we only need to concern ourselves with the smaller game animals that we hunt. Obviously, if we have enough accuracy for the smaller animals then we have more than enough accuracy for the big animals.

Now, even though game animals vary so much in size, we can make some assumptions about the minimum size of the vital area that we need to aim for. Wild pigs can vary enormously in size, and this is whether we are talking about feral pigs, European boars or warthogs. Similarly, there are a lot of smaller antelope and deer species that are the main hunting targets of hunters all over the world. Nevertheless, we can group a large number of these deer, antelope and pigs into a single size of vital area, made up of the combined heart and lung area, and that size is around 20cm (8”). Actually, the heart/lung area, for most game animals, is quite a bit larger than 20cm, but by assuming 20cm we give ourselves a respectable margin for error.

An assumed vital area of 20cm works well for many of the pig species which are found worldwide; for fallow deer which are found across much of the world; for whitetail deer which are the most popular deer species in the USA; and for many of the antelope of Africa. In short, if you can place your shots within a 20cm circle, out to 360m, then you can humanely shoot most of the smaller game animals and all of the larger ones. The only real exceptions are the smallest game animals such as the diminutive antelope of Africa, duikers and the like, the hog deer of Australasia and the roe deer of Europe. However, as most of these little game animals are usually shot at closer ranges and with lighter calibres than our deer, pig or plains game rifles, any rifle that shoots within 20cm at longer ranges will usually work for these animals, too.

In order to hit a 20cm vital area, at 360m, you only need a rifle that is capable of 2 MOA accuracy (2MOA is just a fraction more than 20cm [8″] at 360m [400yards]). If you limited your shots to under 180m (200yards) then you would only need 4MOA of accuracy. Now, it is not difficult to get almost any hunting rifle to shoot between 1 and 1.5MOA, so , against a vital area of 20cm, we have plenty of room for error. Any hunting rifle, capable of 1.5MOA of accuracy, or better, will land all of it’s shots well inside that vital area and should prove lethal, that is provided you have selected a good hunting projectile.

The following images show the relative size of the assumed vital zone of 20cm, at a range of 360m, superimposed on feral pig, impala, fallow deer and whitetailed deer. This shows that the 20cm vital area assumption works for a wide range of animals that are found around the world. The images also show yellow circles that represent the relative size of your groups, with a rifle capable of 1.5MOA accuracy, for both 230m and 360m. Note that the 1.5MOA circles are positioned for high-heart shows where the bullet not only passes through the upper portion of the heart and the centre of the lungs but also will take out the major blood vessels that feed out from the heart. The high-heart shot is, generally speaking, a much more speedy and reliable killer of game.

The LH pig shows the relative size and position of the vitals with a 20cm ring superimposed, the yellow circle on the centre pig shows the size of a 1.5MOA group at 230m and on the RH pig it is a 1.5MOA group at 360m.

The LH impala shows the relative size and position of the vitals with a 20cm ring superimposed, the yellow circle on the centre impala shows the size of a 1.5MOA group at 230m and on the RH impala it is a 1.5MOA group at 360m.

The LH fallow deer shows the relative size and position of the vitals with a 20cm ring superimposed, the yellow circle on the centre deer shows the size of a 1.5MOA group at 230m and on the RH deer it is a 1.5MOA group at 360m.

The LH whitetailed deer shows the relative size and position of the vitals with a 20cm ring superimposed, the yellow circle on the centre deer shows the size of a 1.5MOA group at 230m and on the RH deer it is a 1.5MOA group at 360m.

Why Chase Sub-MOA Accuracy?

So why do so many hunters chase sub-MOA accuracy? Indeed, I know hunters who think that there is something wrong with their rifle if they can’t shoot 0.5 MOA groups. I even know of a hunter who was very upset that he could not get 0.5MOA groups from his .375 H&H! However, if you look at the size of the target animal’s vital zone, as we did above, you can see that there is no need for such accuracy from your hunting rifle. The problem is that we have been brainwashed, by the firearms industry and the gun media, to think that any rifle that shoots greater than 1MOA groups is no good; but this is just not so.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with a hyper accurate hunting rifle and it is only natural to want the best accuracy from your favourite rifles. Indeed, chasing hyper accuracy, for your hunting rifle, can be a lot of fun but that is provided you have the time and the money to do so. However, there is no real benefit in doggedly chasing target rifle accuracy with your hunting rifle if your rifle, and selected ammunition, is not up to the task. To do so, often results in spending lots and lots of time and money in reloading and testing loads and this can also eat up barrel life unnecessarily. For most of us, who are time and/or money poor, there is no need to be misled by the hyper accuracy pundits into wasting valuable resources. Far better to spend the time and money practising hunting skills and doing what is the ultimate goal of this whole exercise, and that is going hunting!

So, in preparation for your hunt, don’t waste time at the shooting bench, burning lots of powder, projectiles and barrel life while trying to wring some sort of enviable, but unnecessary, target accuracy out of your hunting rifle. You will get a great deal more benefit, if you work up a reasonably accurate load, of say 1 to 1.5MOA, with the best hunting projectiles you can obtain, and then get in lots of practice with that load.

In Part Two, to this article, we will examine the concept of Practical Point Blank Range (PPBR) and how you can sight in your hunting rifle to take best advantage of PPBR.

Copyright © 2018 – Robert Pretty – Shoot’n Fish’n ‘n’ Hunt’n.