Excellent bullets and completely safe to use in even vintage double rifles. Very solid choice for elephant, rhino & hippopotamus on land.
I would completely abstain from employing any solid bullets on lions (or indeed, any of the great cats). What you need, is a premium grade expanding bullet which opens up relatively quickly but still holds together long enough to penetrate the hardened chest muscles of an adrenaline fueled lion (esp. during a frontal chest shot). Some of my favorite currently manufactured lion bullets are:
- Swift A Frames (if you can find them these days)
- Northfork Percussion Points
- Hornady DGX Bonded
- Rhino Solid Shanks
- Wim Degol Lions
In the past, Nosler Partition bullets used to be my projectile of choice for the great cats (until Nosler began to constantly keep listing them as "Out Of Stock" ever since the outbreak of the Chinese Virus in 2019).
I have successfully hunted Cape buffalo with solids in the past, prior to 1993. But nowadays, I prefer to exclusively load the entire magazine with premium grade expanding bullets. Not only do they down Cape buffalo visibly faster with heart-lung shots but it must also be borne in mind that the vast majority of African Cape buffalo are hunted in herds. Employing a solid runs the risk of accidentally wounding an animal other than your target game (via complete pass-through of the bullet from the body of the target animal and into a head of game behind him/her). This unfortunately actually happened to me during my life's first safari to Kenya in 1974. I had wounded a Cape buffalo cow when my bullet (a 300Gr RWS steel jacketed FMJ solid factory load fired out of a .375 Holland & Holland Magnum) had passed through my target Cape buffalo bull (during a broadside heart-lung shot) and hit her in the rumen. We didn't realize what had happened until much later. Fortunately, you could get away with this sort of thing in the 1970s without too many legal repercussions. Today... not so much.
