Made with Xara Forward This mini-book is a chapter from my soon-to-be-released book, African Plains and Texas Hill Country Safaris. Failure is only permanent when you cease to evolve. Uncollected trophies on hard to find animals led me to dig deeper into bullet ballistics and construction. In so doing I uncovered a few of the reasons for my failures. The resolution and evolution to my hunting approach are detailed herein. The Texas Hill Country is noted for a particular high-quality problem. For over fifty years exotic animals from aoudad to zebra have either been released or have escaped from game ranches. The resulting feral animals now widely populate the Hill Country. Generally the exotics are larger than our native whitetails in terms of body weight and bone structure, which makes bullet selection much more important. Three goals dominate the research in this chapter. Understanding the results of these three components have helped me be more successful on a wide range of animals here in the Texas Hill Country and Africa. First, we look at the design elements of bullets that determine how they perform in terms of penetration and retained weight. Then we compare the two main schools of thought concerning ballistics. The first and oldest school is the African school which is based on penetration and weight retention. The modern school espoused by American shooters and writers highlights trajectory and bullet velocity. Lastly, we will use all this information to look at a few calibers whereby the benefits of our findings are utilized in an effort to attain the highest kill possibility with the minimum rifle recoil. This research quenched my thirst for a deeper understanding of why some calibers simply kill better than others. With time everyone comes to the well. Perhaps with this research you will not drink the sand as I have. Though the sand never quenched my thirst; I just didn't know the difference. I thirst no more.