Regular visitors to SHWAT™ will know that I am a big fan of the ammunition made by Dynamic Research Technologies or DRT. My first experience with this fine ammo came last November in Oklahoma, when I used DRT’s 79 grain Terminal Shock in .223 to take down a 210 pound wild boar—with a single shot to the ribcage. Impressive! The non-lead, penetrating frangible DRT bullet is designed to punch through hard material like bone and hogshields (“penetrating”), and then essentially explode into the soft tissue beyond (frangible), completely dispersing all its terminal energy and knockdown power within the hog.
Recently, while on a hog hunt in East Texas, I had the chance to use DRT’s .308 Winchester, a 125 grain boat-tailed hollow point, and the results were devastating.
I was night hunting. I’d been up in a deer stand for a couple of hours, overlooking a logging road the local hogs liked to use, but had no luck. So sometime after 10PM I got down and started to walk back to camp, flashing my green Nite Hunter light every so often to see if a hog might be ahead of me. The light was mounted on a rail beneath the barrel of my ArmaLite AR-10(T), topped with Leupold’s VX-R 1.25-4x20mm Hog Riflescope.
I caught sight of the tell-tale humped back, and then a gleam of hog eyes, and came to an abrupt stop.
The hog appeared oblivious to my green light, his nose down to the logging road about 70 yards ahead and facing me. Head shot? No thanks! Not with the angle I had, and with knowing that a hog’s skull has the shape and hardness of a sloped brick. He soon turned and gave me a broadside look. I put the Leupold’s crosshairs on his mid-section, trying for the rib area, and fired.
The hog didn’t even make a full spin, more like a half-pirouette, before it hit the gravel road. It rolled over, once, and went still along the road side.
Two things of note here: One, it was not my best shot; but, Two, the DRT .308 Win. ammo and its impressive knockdown power made up for a shot that was probably six inches to the rear of where it should have been.
DRT uses “powder core technology” to build its bullets. This penetrating frangible bullet is constructed around a highly compressed core of metal powder and has tremendous centrifugal force when entering an animal. Upon penetration, the core turns back to powder, sending a shock wave through the animal that creates a truly destructive wound cavity. There’s no waste of energy in a DRT penetrating frangible bullet: all the energy is released into the animal, and the resulting impact lowers the animal’s blood pressure, instantly causing terminal shock.
At first sight, I though the hog was a smaller guy. Turned out he weighed a good 200 pounds. When my friend David Ellis and I cleaned the boar back at Ellis’ hunting camp, further evidence of DRT’s astounding impact became apparent.
The .308 bullet had pierced the boar about midway down the left side of his thick body, and maybe four inches down from the top of his back. On his right side, as Ellis and I discovered once we stripped off the skin, tiny pieces of the bullet’s jacket had just punctured through the skin. More impressive was the softball-sized mark surrounding these punctures. Once inside the hog, the DRT bullet had released all its energy into a cone shape blast that pulverized its way through to the far wall of the body cavity.
Put another way, that right side of the hog’s rib cage and stomach wall held a fist-sized tattoo of pulpy flesh. As David Ellis said, upon seeing the wound, “Man, it just turned his insides into hamburger, didn’t it?”
It did indeed. I have to think that with another .308 round and my shot placement, that boar may have had enough juice to bolt into the very thick East Texas woods. I’m sure he would have died—but would I have been able to find him?
Thanks to one shot from DRT’s .308 Win., it was a question I didn’t have to consider!
