Hunting
This caliber is generally used for thick-skinned dangerous game such as elephant, rhino, and Cape buffalo. Even among professional ivory hunters of old it is typically treated as an emergency weapon carried by the hunter's gun bearer, reserved for stopping the charge of an enraged, wounded elephant in thick bushes rather than as a day-to-day hunting weapon. Legendary elephant hunter James Sutherland carried a .577. Count Alfred Józef Potocki, Ernest Hemingway, and Stewart Granger also carried .577's.
It is unnecessarily powerful, harsh recoiling, and unwieldy for use against lesser game. For this purpose the old black powder version can be used. It throws a 560-grain bullet at around 1700 ft/s.
Read more about this topic: .577 Nitro Express
Famous quotes containing the word hunting:
“...here he is, fully alive, and it is hard to picture him fully dead. Death is thirty-three hours away and here we are talking about the brain size of birds and bloodhounds and hunting in the woods. You can only attend to death for so long before the life force sucks you right in again.”
—Helen Prejean (b. 1940)
“They take unbelievable pleasure in the hideous blast of the hunting horn and baying of the hounds. Dogs’ dung smells sweet as cinnamon to them.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)
“Signal smokes, war drums, feathered bonnets against the western sky. New messiahs, young leaders are ready to hurl the finest light cavalry in the world against Fort Stark. In the Kiowa village, the beat of drums echoes in the pulsebeat of the young braves. Fighters under a common banner, old quarrels forgotten, Comanche rides with Arapaho, Apache with Cheyenne. All chant of war. War to drive the white man forever from the red man’s hunting ground.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)