Their are a few camps on bullet terminal performance. Some like pass through and some like mushrooms and energy expended in the animal.
Honestly I'm probably somewhere in the middle. After reading Sabotloaders pictorial on the monolithics I'll have some of those on order shortly.
For the last 10 years or so I've been using boat tail, pointed, pure lead saboted bullets for hunting elk in SW Washington. The first of these for me was Buffalo Bullets 375 grain SSB. I loved that bullet and shopped nationwide on the net to find them once Buffalo stopped production. Eventually I had to give in to change so I moved to Precision Rifles 360 grain Extreme Elite. It is just a clone of the SSB but a touch lighter. After Washington legalized plastic tips I tried the PR 340 Dead Center. This is the bullet I shoot today.
These bullets fly very well, very accurate. But ignore the advertised BC. If you shoot across your chrony at muzzle and 100 yards you can use the velocity and bullet drop to get a much better BC value if you wish (But once you've done all that you wont need the BC for anything).
I've tried many others over the years also, but these 3 have been my elk killers. 9 elk in all. Ranges from 15 yard head shots to 150 yard broadside shots. I also have a love affair with mmp sabots, but that's another story.
For the most part bullets are recovered under the hide on the far side. These are all from elk. The bullets in the pics are from all 3 bullets. I couldn't tell you which. You can tell impact rang(velocity) and if they hit ribs and such from the pics. You can tell the longer range ones that didn't hit much bone. They have the nice uniform mushroom.
