Meat damage is one of Andrew Venables’ primary reasons to move away from lead bullets. For him, the argument revolves around weight retention.
“You’ve seen the x-rays, you’ve seen the ballistic media, the different pictures going around on social media. 40% of that bullet is left in the animal. Copper retain literally 99% of their weight. With the plastic-tip ones you lose the plastic, but then they retain 98% of their weight.”
One of the main complaints about shooting smaller deer with the high-velocity .243 is it creates fragmentation.
Andrew points to the shoulders of a muntjac he shot with a copper .243. It broke through the shoulder on one side of the animal and went out through the shoulder blade on the other side. “It left a hole in the shoulder blade, he says – “no contamination, no metal and, because there’s less fragmentation, you don’t get blood shot meat around the wound. You do get the hydraulic/hydrostatic shock.
“I found that you can harvest more meat more effectively with the copper bullets.”
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