Thread: oryx projectiles

G'Day Rigga

I've used Oryx on scrub cattle, in the Northern Territory. 30 cal from a .308 Winchester, factory ammo, weight was 165gr if I remember correctly.

There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever about penetration, it is a hard bullet. The ranges we were shooting could be quite long for scrub cattle, as they had been shot at a fair bit already. 100m+ was normal, 200m+ fairly frequent. We had a 300 Win Mag for the proper long shots. In the East Cape Raukumaras which is the only place I've done scrub cattle in NZ, it tended to be all sub-100m in thickish scrub.

What I found is that the placement was absolutely critical. To far back behind the shoulder, and / or too low, and the Oryx would pass right through and the animal would run, fast and sometimes very far. You don't want that happening in thick bush, especially if the bull knows where you are. It was really important to place the bullet well forward into the shoulder, in the front line of the foreleg, slap bang in the middle of the torso vertically. The anatomy is different to large deer or antelope. Probably not telling you anything you don't already know but worth mentioning anyway. The Oryx had no problems knocking them over with good placement, a solid shoulder strike would stop the beast from running far and it would drop quickly.

The one guy we shot with used Sierra ProHunter round nose 180gr in his .308 Win, so heavy for calibre and quite slow (2400fps?) and overall I'd say that bullet was more forgiving and that's what I ended up using for everything up there, scrub cattle, big pigs, camels, donkeys, when using the .308 Win. The bullets we recovered had shed more weight than the Oryx and the radius of damage was greater.

But at the end of the day, most of the animals were head shot. As long as a good rest was available and they weren't too far away. They are not hard to head shoot with a decent rifle. I'll say this and risk getting a hard time from one or two, but we head shot a lot of cull animals with my .223 T3 Super Varmint using 64gr protected points. Absolutely clinical. I think that's the key for scrub cattle, no matter what rifle & cartridge you're using, if you can reliably shoot proper sub-MOA with it in the field within 300m, a head or neck shot is a bloody good option. Anything a bit iffy, then with a 7mm or .30cal just make sure you smack it hard in the right place.

I think this one was shot with an Oryx, may have been a ProHunter, head shot from about 100m, standing, using a staunch branch as a rest off the side of a tree.



I've got this in my photo library, I think this is what we were given by the station guys.