During the last year I have taken to carrying a revolver on my hip as back-up while hunting with a rifle. I started doing this while hunting pigs and found it handy enough that it usually comes with me when I'm hunting deer or other critters as well. When I need to administer a finishing shot from a few paces away I would rather use something with a little bit less boom and splatter than my thirty ought six.While I own more rifles than I have even bothered to count (a few dozen, I think), I only have a few handguns. I didn't have any money to spend on a new handgun for medium to large game, so I had to make do with my snub-nosed Taurus .38 special. At the very short distances that I was concerned with, I figured that the .38 would do all right on pigs within a dozen yards or less.
The big question was what type of ammunition to use. Plenty of people hunt deer, pigs and black bear with the .357 magnum (which is almost the exact same cartridge as the .38 special, only the case is a quarter of an inch longer to hold more powder) and there are several manufacturers offering good hunting loads for the .357. But not many people hunt with the .38 special and I couldn't find any hunting ammunition in stores a few days before hitting the road for a hunt last summer.
What I decided to try was a box of self-defense ammunition. Specifically a box of Hornady's 'Critical Defense' ammo, loaded with 110 grain FTX bullets. This ammunition is also a '+P' load, which means that it uses an especially powerful charge of powder compared to what is standard for the cartridge. +P ammunition should only be used in guns that you know for certain are proofed by the manufacturer to safely handle it. My Taurus happens to fall into that category.
Ammunition designed for self defense seems like it ought to work pretty well on deer and pig sized critters within a few yards. In the cases of both self-defense and hunting, the idea is for the bullet to expand quickly enough to dump a lot of energy into a target weighing a few hundred pounds, but not to expand so quickly as to stop before it has penetrated fully through the vital organs. The diameter of a mature pig's body is pretty similar to that of a somewhat overweight human being and it seemed to me like a bullet made to work on humans ought to work well on pigs.
In practice I was amazed at the poor performance of this ammunition on pigs.
Many shots to the vitals were required in order to drop an animal that I spotted at dusk. All but one of those shots would probably have killed the pig within a few minutes, but when you are hunting pigs at dusk you need the animal to be 'dead right there.' An extra thirty seconds on its feet is enough time for either an attack against the hunter or (more likely) a pig that has made it into the thick brush and could take hours to find in the dark.
Part of my problem was probably the angle. I was using the revolver for additional shots after taking the first shot with a rifle. The pig was, by this point, doing its best to run away from me while I was shooting down at it from about four or five yards away. In order to reach the heart (not that a heart shot is the only thing that will do the job) from that angle, my bullet had to traverse roughly 18 inches of meat and bone.
While the diameter of a pig's body is similar to that of a human attacker, the difference is that the human is presumably standing upright, directly in front of you. He isn't on all fours facing the opposite direction. A self-defense bullet only needs to penetrate around eight inches to take down all but the most enormous of human assailants.
My failure to consider trigonometry could have ended a lot worse. The pig in question was eventually subdued after a running fight and rather a lot of ammunition.
The .38 is still a fine choice for finishing off a mortally wounded animal that can no longer stand. But when you need to stop a running hog, I do not suggest depending on anything lighter than a .357 magnum unless you have a really great trick for getting the pig to stand up on its hind legs. If I ever have two dimes to rub together, I'm going to trade up to a .357 or a .44 magnum with a longer barrel to carry on pig hunts.
Aside from the long distance of meat that I required the bullet to travel in order to hit the vitals, I was still not impressed with the performance of the FTX bullet.
Several of the bullets were recovered while I butchered the pig, including the bullet that you see in the accompanying photo (click it to embiggen). The plastic tip failed to properly separate and the jacket of the bullet failed to open. It only tore slightly at the top.
If there is an excuse for that kind of bullet performance, I don't know what it is. This bullet was fired at a distance of less than five yards -- a reasonable self-defense range -- and there should have been plenty of velocity to allow the bullet to open up. If this is typical performance then Hornady needs to redesign that plastic tip and perhaps use a thinner jacket. Maybe this bullet would work great out of a .357 magnum but it sure didn't work the way it was supposed to out of my .38 special.
In conclusion, I do not suggest the .38 special as a smart choice to hunt pigs with, and its important to remember that ammunition designed to kill people won't necessarily be powerful enough for hunting.
[Photo copyright 2012 by Jackson Landers.]
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