Hi, that would be me. I have heard the leprosy thing for 50 years! and have never seen a case. I closely inspect every wild animal I harvest [including fish] for sickness, lesions abnormalities etc inside and out. dillos are delish :thumb: just the legs tho, there isnt much else on them.
As far as damage caused by different ammo I have had it blow right thru or stay within the body, in both cases I skin them out and check the damage inside and out. I use dillos {ballistically} because they are 7 to 9 inches wide and have soft armour which i think helps the realism because they have small bones. also they are incredibly hard to one shot stop! you can blow a hole right thru em and they'll still run 30 yrds at full speed.I probably have 20% drop,20% run less than ten yrds and 60% run up to 30 yrds or so.
I have used 9mm, 38/40/45 cal in whatever was the hot new thing at the time,[ 1980/present]what ballistic charts/fbi/marshall sanow/magazines were hyping at the time, my latest and best round to date was pdx1 out of a glock 23 at a large dillo at 12 yards.
Without going into boring detail my findings in general are these:
1.shot placement is KING! spend your money on training not crazy rounds.
2.leaving aside sales hype,bullet design really has come a long way,25 years ago 38/9mm were useless on dillos, they are now quite effective. but looking at the internal damage/exit wounds 40/45 is still somewhat better.
3. For years I subscibed to the lighter,faster school of thought ie. corbons quik shoks, because bullet designs at the time caused the heavy slower bullets to not expand reliably, over penetrate and cause less internal damage.I now have done a complete reversal, again due to bullet design/performance and use the heavier bullets,ex. 180 grains pdx1 in 40 cal.they expand hugely,reliably, do awesome damage inside and out, keep their jackets, less over penetration, better performance against hard targets etc.
4. So in a nut shell all the above calibres with good modern ammo[golddot,winchester etc] will due the trick although I stil prefer the larger cals.
it is more what you shoot with the most accuracy/comfort.If you want good ballistics with alot of rounds go 9 mil, better ballistics less rounds 40 cal,best balistics even less rounds 45. Due to the exellence of the latest ammo offerings, calibre picks take on less importance to me and accuracy takes on more.
5. just my opinion about ammo that seemed to do the most damage/feed, perform/reliably,out of a magnum research 9 mm,glock 23,colt commander,38 charter arms snubbie.
Win pdx1/fed hst/golddot in the heavier loads.It just depends on what your gun feeds the best and what you shoot the best. all 3 fully expand, do horrific internal damage and only over penetrate a couple of feet 90% of the time, stay in the animal 10% of the time. Again my shots are mostly side on , between 10 to 15 yards, yes i measure.
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sorry to run on like this on something as weird as shooting dillos :rofl: hope this helped. :zombie
P.S I'm tired of writing but on a brief note, shooting hogs is a whole nuther thang! perhaps its the heavier bones I dont know but the larger cals seem to do a much better job for me.