Thread: Karamojo Bell comments

Bell wasnt the only one using things like the .303 and 7x57 on elephants in those days. No one cared what you used, there was no laws about it. And FMJ miltary was about perfect bullets for it. Even in modern days when the game rangers were culling elephants in the 1980's they used to use SLR's and military ball.
I remember watching a documetary in Australia in the 1980's about a guy who was shooting buffalo for a mobile meat plant on a trailer that he had. He would shoot hundreds of them every week, all with a Ruger 77 in .308 using 147 grain military.

After about 1912, Bell seems to settle on the .318 Westley Richards as his ëlephant"rifle"" and used it for the rest of his career. When he went back to elephant shooting after WW1 he didnt use the .275 again. He did shoot most of his thousand elephants with a 7x57 (about 800) but he considered the .318 WR superior, if you could get reliable ammo.

after 1923 he spent the rest of his hunting life shooting red deer in Scotland with a .22 hipower, (in a littel Rigby- Mauser rifle) and then a Winchester model 70 in .220 Swift.

""Karamojo Safari"" is a better book to read than "Wanderings of an Elephant Hunter". It's all about just one safari, his last one into the Karamojo.

(Out of interest the next safari he did was into Uganda by way of the Sudan, and he went with his mate Harry Rayne, who was a New Zealander. (Who later became the Game warden for Kenya and wrote his own book called Ivory Raiders))