I don’t disagree with his final statement bullet placement is more important than knock down energy, but pretending there is no such thing as knock down energy is ridiculous. I’m not sure how he can hunt that long and say it’s not something he’s ever seen. Couple interesting hunting observations I’ve had, one was a zebra in Namibia and really a bullet failure. The bullet hit a little low on point of shoulder and just knocked him flat off his feet. We approached and he got up to run. Turned out the bullet only penetrated several inches. The knock down power was clear to see, but he’s correct it needed a shot with penetration through the vitals to kill. Had that been a 243 instead of a 300 though, it simply would have ran away. Another is I shoot many ground hogs with my 300 and 375 as practice. With heavy well constructed bullets they will run because bullet can initiate expansion, but shoot the same with a light bullet designed to expand and a 223 and they will run no where. He really needed to include a discussion of bullet performance to supplement his theory. Energy/knock down power is also pretty clear in the meat damage of using a smaller rifle vs a larger one, once the skin is off. An animal hit with a small caliber (same bullet, less energy) vs a larger caliber (same bullet, more energy) will take longer to die. I never thought this would be a discussion point?
To your point, why not use bigger. If meat damage isn’t s factor, I think people should use the biggest gun they can handle. However, I think many will over estimate this. There are many TV episodes and YouTube clips of “outdoor personalities” with big rifles and their flinch is obvious even though they pretend to be an expert with that rifle.
I'd assert the opposite is true - assuming there is knockdown power is ridiculous.
not sure how knock down power is even a thing. The idea that I could knock over a 200 lb deer that has 9000X more mass than a 150 gr bullet is a logical absurdity. And in general, the difference between big. heavy game and the bullets used to kill them is even more stark.
An 1800 lb cape buffalo has more than 40,000 times the mass of a 300 gr bullet. A 12K pound ele has almost 170,000X more mass than even a 500 gr bullet.
I do believe there is value in Talyor KO formula, but it ain't "knockdown" power. and FWIW, I think his real shot was at the Hatcher Theory, which is just absolute BS. We've known for decades that Hatcher is complete BS.
When I was a cadet in the Houston police academy, we watched a number of surveillance camera videos of shootouts in convenience stores and the like. One of them, the clerk shot the turd with a 44 Mag from about 10 feet. He didn't get knocked down, or even fall down. He *ran* outside to the edge of the parking lot, sat down, and bled to death
Similar to that, there was the story of a soldier firing an M2 (or some HMG) that catastrophically failed...the bolt was pushed through the rear of the machine gun and did a complete through and through on the soldier. No knockdown from a distance of about a foot, and I'd guess an M2 bolt weighs a pound or two.
My own personal experience - shot about a 150# 1-horned spike with a 165 gr 30-06 once. Shot distance was about 40 or 50 yards. The buck had such a lack of reaction to the shot, I was sure I'd cleanly missed it - he didn't fall over, jump, bleat, or even run off - he just continued walking like there hadn't been a shot 5 seconds earlier. Then I went to look for the blood trail, was so patent even a little kid could follow it. I recovered the bullet just under the offside skin. Surely THAT should have knocked the deer down since it "dumped all its energy into the deer."
If there were anything to the idea of knockdown power, the effect of physics on the targets would be consistent, and the effect(s) most ricky-tick ain't consistent. I'd bet a paycheck there isn't a guy on this forum who has knocked down *every single animal they ever killed*. We've all shot animals who just didn't know they were dead yet and ran off to die a couple hundred yards away.
