.45 ACP vs Moose: What Actually Happens

One man in the woods where the moose are, strapped with XD in .45 on his hip. >>  >> He’s not hunting. He just wants to know if the gun means anything when a thousand pounds of animal decides he’s a problem. He asked on a forum,  but nobody answered it. I admit that it is a hard one, but I love the challenge.

>>  >> So, let’s answer it. First off, this is not a deer. Nothing about shooting a deer prepares you  for this. An Alaska Yukon moose, which is the biggest kind, runs from about 800 pounds on a small cow to 1600 pounds on a large bull. Shoulder height tops out around 6 feet. You’ll see people online say a moose is 14 feet  tall. It isn’t.

That figure is the head and the antlers, not the animal’s height at the shoulder. A big bull grows an 80-pound rack of antler in a single summer,  adding about a pound of bone and an inch of length a day through the season. >>  >> That’s according to Alaska’s own Department of Fish and Game. A large brown bear on the coast runs about the same weight as a large bull, but a moose is built longer and taller with heavy leg bone and a deep chest.

Now, the reason moose come up next to bears at all is that people carry a woods gun for both. >>  >> Same holster, same round, two very different animals. And the moment you separate them, the .45 question splits into two answers. So, let’s deal to start with the bears first because of the large bank of evidence.

But even that bank of evidence is also more limited than most people admit. There’s one study everybody should be citing and most people cite wrong. It’s called Efficacy of Firearms for Bear Deterrents in Alaska. It ran in the Journal of Wildlife Management in 2012. The authors were Tom Smith, Stephen Herrero, and three others.

They went through 269 bear encounters involving firearms in Alaska going back to 1883 all the way up to 2009. 444 people, at least 367 bears. This is the real thing, peer-reviewed, not a blog post. That’s the difference between knowing something and having read it somewhere. It’s the whole idea behind a guide I put together, 105 pages on firearms for people who take the woods seriously and want the version that holds up.

Scan the QR code on screen or the link is in the description. >>  >> So, here’s what they found. Handguns stopped the aggressive bear 84% of the time. Long guns, rifles and shotguns, stopped it 76% of the time. And this is the part that surprises  people. There was no meaningful difference between the two.

A handgun did not do worse than a rifle in their data. If anything, the handgun number was a touch higher and the authors are careful to say the sample is too small to call that a real gap. The study ran the numbers on what actually predicted whether you stopped the bear and the type of gun didn’t predict it. >>  >> The number of shots didn’t predict it.

You know what did? The species of bear, whether the bear was charging, what the person was doing when it happened, whether there was fish or game meat around. And the single biggest factor was the species. The odds of stopping the animal were more than 38 times better when it was a black bear than when it was a brown or a polar bear. But a .

45 that’s perfectly credible on a black bear is a different proposition on a brown bear. >>  >> The reason has almost nothing to do with the cartridge and almost everything to do with what you’re pointing it at. >>  >> Which brings us straight back to the moose. But hold that thought. I want to bring in the man who actually makes the ammunition everyone in this argument is talking about because he’s on the record and what he says is more useful than any forum.

Tim Sundles owns Buffalo Bore. If you carry hard cast in a .45 for the woods, there’s a good chance it came out of his shop or one built on the same idea. He sat for an interview with Field Ethos published in August 2021 and he was blunt about a few things. First, the bullet. His words,  “Expanding bullets are for people.

They’re no good on bears. You want hard cast.” That’s the whole philosophy in two sentences and it’s the one thing in this entire debate that isn’t really debated by anyone who’s done it. Second, his own guns. For walking around in the woods day-to-day, he carries a Glock 41 in .45 ACP with a 255 grain hard cast bullet. 14 rounds.

He says flatly, “It’ll shoot all the way through a black bear.” That’s his general  gun. But when he’s alone in grizzly country in Alaska, he doesn’t carry that. He carries a .500 Linebaugh with a 440 grain bullet and he calls a .454 Casull the least he’d bring for grizzly. He drew the exact line the study drew.

The .45 hard cast is his black bear gun and his everyday  gun. For the big bears, he steps up and he steps up a long way. >>  >> Same man, same brand, two completely different tools for two completely different animals. There’s one more thing Sundles said that’s worth getting exactly right  because it gets mangled online.

Most Alaska State Troopers, according to him, carry a Glock 20 in 10 mm loaded with his 220 grain hard cast. So when you hear that the pros in bear country carry 10-mm. >>  >> That part’s true, at least by his account. This is the point where the .45 crowd has a real argument instead of a stubborn one. Sundles has gone further than that, though not in the interview.

In his own videos, he’s made the case more than once that he’d rather carry a .45 ACP plus P with hardcast than his own 10-mm for this job. His reasoning is simple. The 10-mm will out-penetrate the .45. He’ll tell you that himself. But once a bullet has gone all the way through the animal, more penetration past  that point doesn’t buy you anything, and the .

45 puts a wider hole through the middle. Bigger frontal  area, enough penetration, nothing wasted out the far side. So you’ve  got two true things sitting next to each other. The troopers carry 10-mm. >>  >> The man who makes the ammo would rather have a .45 with the right bullet. Both of those are real, and you don’t have to pick a fight between them.

You just have to understand that  the professionals carry 10-mm, and 10-mm is clearly better are two different claims,  and only the first one is settled. The bullet matters more than the caliber, >>  >> and this is the mechanism. A hardcast bullet is exactly what it sounds like. Lead alloyed hard, cast into a flat-nosed shape, no jacket to peel, no hollow point to open up.

It’s built to do one thing, go straight  and go deep. It doesn’t expand, and on a big animal, that’s the point.  You don’t want a bullet that dumps its energy in the first few inches and stops. You  want one that drives through hide and muscle and heavy bone in a straight line and comes out the other side.

Compare that to a hollow point, which is designed to open up and stay inside a human attacker.  On a bear or a moose, that same bullet gives up its penetration right when you need it most and it can deflect off heavy angled bone instead of punching through. That’s why every serious person in this conversation says the same thing about hollow points on big game. Don’t.

Now, does the .45 actually have the penetration to make good on that? There’s a well-known test a  lot of this audience has already seen where a guy fired both .45 and 10 mm into a target  to mimic a heavy animal. Beef ribs standing in for the rib cage,  water jugs behind them for the lungs.

Same brands of ammo in both calibers. >>  >> And the result that surprised everybody was that even cheap full metal jacket hardball, the plain stuff,  drove through and did serious damage in both calibers. The expensive hunting loads were better, but the gap was smaller than the price tag  suggests.

Hardball went deep. Buffalo Bore’s own numbers back this up and they publish them honestly, which I respect. Their .45 ACP plus P hardcast, the 255 grain load, they advertise at 925 ft per second. But on their own product page, they list what it actually did out of a real pistol, a 5-in Colt, and it ran 960.

They say plainly that lab test barrels lie and they’d rather show you what a real gun does. That’s the load doing about 480 ft lbs at the muzzle. And on that same page, they tell you exactly what they built it for. In their words, the non-expanding loads are designed to shoot through large shoulder bones or the skull on a black bear.

Shoulder bones. Black bear. The company that makes the round is telling you the target is the shoulder and the animal they have in mind is a black bear. They’re not selling it to you as a grizzly gun. They’re being honest about what it’s for. So now we’ve got the picture on bears. A .

45 with hard cast is a real black bear gun, backed by the study, backed by the man who makes the ammo, backed by  the physics of the bullet. On the big bears, it’s a fall back, a what you have on you gun, and even the ammo maker steps up to something much larger when the stakes  are grizzly. Now, let’s finally answer the actual question.

The moose. And here’s the truth. There’s almost no data. All that bear research, the 269 cases,  the decades of records, none of it is moose. Moose attacks happen, but the people who face one down are carrying a rifle, not a pistol. >>  >> Handgun versus moose barely exists as a recorded event.

So, we reason it out from  what we do know. A moose is bigger than a black bear, and about the size of  a big brown bear, and it’s built long and tall with heavy bone. The study already told us the animal matters more than the caliber, and that success  drops off a cliff on the large animals. A moose sits on the wrong side of that line.

So, if a .45 hard cast is a fall back on a brown bear, it’s a fall back on a moose for the same reason. The animal  is too big and too heavily built for a handgun round to be your plan A. But,  and this matters, a moose is also a different kind of threat than a bear. A bear can stalk you and rush at you with no warning.

A moose is enormous and visible from a long way off, and moose aggression is nearly always something you can see coming and avoid. >>  >> The move with a moose is not to stand your ground and win a gun fight. The move is to put something solid between you and it, a truck, a tree, a building,  and let it lose interest. Nobody hands you a medal for holding your ground against a moose.

You run,  and you use the terrain, and the odds are you never needed the gun at all. >>  >> That’s the piece the caliber argument always misses. With a bear, the gun might be the only thing between you and the animal. >>  >> With a moose, your legs and your eyes are the real defense, and the gun is the thing you fall back on if everything else has already gone wrong.

Which brings me to the thing that actually decides whether any of this works, and it’s not the caliber, and it’s not even the animal. The study found  it. The number of shots didn’t predict success. The type of gun didn’t predict  success. But the study’s own conclusion was that only people who are genuinely proficient  with a firearm should rely on one in bear country.

That’s the finding underneath all the other findings. The gun works if you can run it under the worst pressure you’ll ever feel, and it doesn’t  if you can’t. And this is the real argument for the .45, the one that’s actually strong. Not that it hits harder than a magnum, because  it doesn’t.

The argument is that most people shoot it far better than they shoot a magnum. A .454 Casull kicks like a mule and takes a long time to get back on target. A big bore revolver gives you five or six rounds  and a long heavy trigger. A .45 gives you a manageable push, a fast recovery, and a magazine of rounds you can actually place.

There’s a comment under one of these videos that puts it better than I could. A grizzly can cover 50 yards in 3 seconds. In that window,  hits you can actually make are worth more than power you can’t control. That’s the  case, and it’s a good one. If the choice is a hand cannon you flinch through or a .

45 you can run clean, the .45 you can run clean is a real answer. Now let me deal honestly with the other side because there’s a strong version of the case against the .45, and you deserve to hear it. The bullet can  fail. A hard cast flat nose is a straight line penetrator on flesh, and it’ll  drive through a shoulder, but on heavy angled bone, a skull hit at the wrong angle, it can deflect instead of  punching through.

That’s a real failure mode, not a rumor. So, the honest claim isn’t that a .45  punches through anything. It’s that a well-placed hard cast round drives  deep through the body, and the skull shot on a big angry animal is not the shot  to bet your life on. There’s the reliability question, too. A revolver, if it goes click,  you pull the trigger again, and the cylinder turns.

A semi-auto that malfunctions at the worst possible second  is a different problem. That’s a real trade-off. The counter is capacity and speed, more rounds and faster follow-up, and both sides of that are legitimate. You’re weighing the semi-auto’s rounds and speed against the revolver’s dead simple reliability, and reasonable people land in different places.

And there’s cost, which is the one nobody wants to talk about. Good hard cast .45 runs you around $2 a round, sometimes  more. Running 100 rounds through your carry gun to make sure it feeds and functions with that exact load, and you should, gets expensive fast. That’s a real barrier, and it’s worth naming  because a load you’ve never actually fired a full magazine of is a load you’re guessing on.

So, >>  >> is a .45 ACP enough for a moose? As your only plan against a moose, no,  it’s not enough. And the reason isn’t the .45, it’s the animal. 1,600  lb of heavy boned animal is more than a handgun round should be asked to be the whole answer to, the same way it’s more than the study says you should count on against a big bear.

The hardware isn’t the weak link. The size of what you’re shooting is. But as the gun on your hip while you use your eyes and your legs the way you’re supposed to with a moose,  loaded with hardcast, run by someone who’s actually practiced with it, it’s a real fallback. It’s the same gun the man who makes the ammo carries every day in the woods, and he’s killed more animals than most of us will ever see.

He just  doesn’t pretend it’s a grizzly gun, and neither should you. The real answer to the guy on Reddit is the one nobody in the thread gave him. Carry the .45 if it’s what you’ll actually carry and actually train with, load it  right, and understand that with a moose, the gun is your last resort, and your judgment is your first one.

See the animal early. >>  >> Give it room. Put something solid between you. The pistol is there for the day all of that fails. >>  >> And if you’ve done the rest right, that day probably never comes. That’s the  honest version, not the biggest caliber wins, and not the .45 does everything.

The animal decides more than the gun does. The bullet matters more than the caliber, and the person behind it matters most of all. That’s the video. Your call on the subscribe button.

.45 ACP vs Moose: What Actually Happens

One man in the woods where the moose are, strapped with XD in .45 on his hip. >>  >> He’s not hunting. He just wants to know if the gun means anything when a thousand pounds of animal decides he’s a problem. He asked on a forum,  but nobody answered it. I admit that it is a hard one, but I love the challenge.

>>  >> So, let’s answer it. First off, this is not a deer. Nothing about shooting a deer prepares you  for this. An Alaska Yukon moose, which is the biggest kind, runs from about 800 pounds on a small cow to 1600 pounds on a large bull. Shoulder height tops out around 6 feet. You’ll see people online say a moose is 14 feet  tall. It isn’t.

That figure is the head and the antlers, not the animal’s height at the shoulder. A big bull grows an 80-pound rack of antler in a single summer,  adding about a pound of bone and an inch of length a day through the season. >>  >> That’s according to Alaska’s own Department of Fish and Game. A large brown bear on the coast runs about the same weight as a large bull, but a moose is built longer and taller with heavy leg bone and a deep chest.

Now, the reason moose come up next to bears at all is that people carry a woods gun for both. >>  >> Same holster, same round, two very different animals. And the moment you separate them, the .45 question splits into two answers. So, let’s deal to start with the bears first because of the large bank of evidence.

But even that bank of evidence is also more limited than most people admit. There’s one study everybody should be citing and most people cite wrong. It’s called Efficacy of Firearms for Bear Deterrents in Alaska. It ran in the Journal of Wildlife Management in 2012. The authors were Tom Smith, Stephen Herrero, and three others.

They went through 269 bear encounters involving firearms in Alaska going back to 1883 all the way up to 2009. 444 people, at least 367 bears. This is the real thing, peer-reviewed, not a blog post. That’s the difference between knowing something and having read it somewhere. It’s the whole idea behind a guide I put together, 105 pages on firearms for people who take the woods seriously and want the version that holds up.

Scan the QR code on screen or the link is in the description. >>  >> So, here’s what they found. Handguns stopped the aggressive bear 84% of the time. Long guns, rifles and shotguns, stopped it 76% of the time. And this is the part that surprises  people. There was no meaningful difference between the two.

A handgun did not do worse than a rifle in their data. If anything, the handgun number was a touch higher and the authors are careful to say the sample is too small to call that a real gap. The study ran the numbers on what actually predicted whether you stopped the bear and the type of gun didn’t predict it. >>  >> The number of shots didn’t predict it.

You know what did? The species of bear, whether the bear was charging, what the person was doing when it happened, whether there was fish or game meat around. And the single biggest factor was the species. The odds of stopping the animal were more than 38 times better when it was a black bear than when it was a brown or a polar bear. But a .

45 that’s perfectly credible on a black bear is a different proposition on a brown bear. >>  >> The reason has almost nothing to do with the cartridge and almost everything to do with what you’re pointing it at. >>  >> Which brings us straight back to the moose. But hold that thought. I want to bring in the man who actually makes the ammunition everyone in this argument is talking about because he’s on the record and what he says is more useful than any forum.

Tim Sundles owns Buffalo Bore. If you carry hard cast in a .45 for the woods, there’s a good chance it came out of his shop or one built on the same idea. He sat for an interview with Field Ethos published in August 2021 and he was blunt about a few things. First, the bullet. His words,  “Expanding bullets are for people.

They’re no good on bears. You want hard cast.” That’s the whole philosophy in two sentences and it’s the one thing in this entire debate that isn’t really debated by anyone who’s done it. Second, his own guns. For walking around in the woods day-to-day, he carries a Glock 41 in .45 ACP with a 255 grain hard cast bullet. 14 rounds.

He says flatly, “It’ll shoot all the way through a black bear.” That’s his general  gun. But when he’s alone in grizzly country in Alaska, he doesn’t carry that. He carries a .500 Linebaugh with a 440 grain bullet and he calls a .454 Casull the least he’d bring for grizzly. He drew the exact line the study drew.

The .45 hard cast is his black bear gun and his everyday  gun. For the big bears, he steps up and he steps up a long way. >>  >> Same man, same brand, two completely different tools for two completely different animals. There’s one more thing Sundles said that’s worth getting exactly right  because it gets mangled online.

Most Alaska State Troopers, according to him, carry a Glock 20 in 10 mm loaded with his 220 grain hard cast. So when you hear that the pros in bear country carry 10-mm. >>  >> That part’s true, at least by his account. This is the point where the .45 crowd has a real argument instead of a stubborn one. Sundles has gone further than that, though not in the interview.

In his own videos, he’s made the case more than once that he’d rather carry a .45 ACP plus P with hardcast than his own 10-mm for this job. His reasoning is simple. The 10-mm will out-penetrate the .45. He’ll tell you that himself. But once a bullet has gone all the way through the animal, more penetration past  that point doesn’t buy you anything, and the .

45 puts a wider hole through the middle. Bigger frontal  area, enough penetration, nothing wasted out the far side. So you’ve  got two true things sitting next to each other. The troopers carry 10-mm. >>  >> The man who makes the ammo would rather have a .45 with the right bullet. Both of those are real, and you don’t have to pick a fight between them.

You just have to understand that  the professionals carry 10-mm, and 10-mm is clearly better are two different claims,  and only the first one is settled. The bullet matters more than the caliber, >>  >> and this is the mechanism. A hardcast bullet is exactly what it sounds like. Lead alloyed hard, cast into a flat-nosed shape, no jacket to peel, no hollow point to open up.

It’s built to do one thing, go straight  and go deep. It doesn’t expand, and on a big animal, that’s the point.  You don’t want a bullet that dumps its energy in the first few inches and stops. You  want one that drives through hide and muscle and heavy bone in a straight line and comes out the other side.

Compare that to a hollow point, which is designed to open up and stay inside a human attacker.  On a bear or a moose, that same bullet gives up its penetration right when you need it most and it can deflect off heavy angled bone instead of punching through. That’s why every serious person in this conversation says the same thing about hollow points on big game. Don’t.

Now, does the .45 actually have the penetration to make good on that? There’s a well-known test a  lot of this audience has already seen where a guy fired both .45 and 10 mm into a target  to mimic a heavy animal. Beef ribs standing in for the rib cage,  water jugs behind them for the lungs.

Same brands of ammo in both calibers. >>  >> And the result that surprised everybody was that even cheap full metal jacket hardball, the plain stuff,  drove through and did serious damage in both calibers. The expensive hunting loads were better, but the gap was smaller than the price tag  suggests.

Hardball went deep. Buffalo Bore’s own numbers back this up and they publish them honestly, which I respect. Their .45 ACP plus P hardcast, the 255 grain load, they advertise at 925 ft per second. But on their own product page, they list what it actually did out of a real pistol, a 5-in Colt, and it ran 960.

They say plainly that lab test barrels lie and they’d rather show you what a real gun does. That’s the load doing about 480 ft lbs at the muzzle. And on that same page, they tell you exactly what they built it for. In their words, the non-expanding loads are designed to shoot through large shoulder bones or the skull on a black bear.

Shoulder bones. Black bear. The company that makes the round is telling you the target is the shoulder and the animal they have in mind is a black bear. They’re not selling it to you as a grizzly gun. They’re being honest about what it’s for. So now we’ve got the picture on bears. A .

45 with hard cast is a real black bear gun, backed by the study, backed by the man who makes the ammo, backed by  the physics of the bullet. On the big bears, it’s a fall back, a what you have on you gun, and even the ammo maker steps up to something much larger when the stakes  are grizzly. Now, let’s finally answer the actual question.

The moose. And here’s the truth. There’s almost no data. All that bear research, the 269 cases,  the decades of records, none of it is moose. Moose attacks happen, but the people who face one down are carrying a rifle, not a pistol. >>  >> Handgun versus moose barely exists as a recorded event.

So, we reason it out from  what we do know. A moose is bigger than a black bear, and about the size of  a big brown bear, and it’s built long and tall with heavy bone. The study already told us the animal matters more than the caliber, and that success  drops off a cliff on the large animals. A moose sits on the wrong side of that line.

So, if a .45 hard cast is a fall back on a brown bear, it’s a fall back on a moose for the same reason. The animal  is too big and too heavily built for a handgun round to be your plan A. But,  and this matters, a moose is also a different kind of threat than a bear. A bear can stalk you and rush at you with no warning.

A moose is enormous and visible from a long way off, and moose aggression is nearly always something you can see coming and avoid. >>  >> The move with a moose is not to stand your ground and win a gun fight. The move is to put something solid between you and it, a truck, a tree, a building,  and let it lose interest. Nobody hands you a medal for holding your ground against a moose.

You run,  and you use the terrain, and the odds are you never needed the gun at all. >>  >> That’s the piece the caliber argument always misses. With a bear, the gun might be the only thing between you and the animal. >>  >> With a moose, your legs and your eyes are the real defense, and the gun is the thing you fall back on if everything else has already gone wrong.

Which brings me to the thing that actually decides whether any of this works, and it’s not the caliber, and it’s not even the animal. The study found  it. The number of shots didn’t predict success. The type of gun didn’t predict  success. But the study’s own conclusion was that only people who are genuinely proficient  with a firearm should rely on one in bear country.

That’s the finding underneath all the other findings. The gun works if you can run it under the worst pressure you’ll ever feel, and it doesn’t  if you can’t. And this is the real argument for the .45, the one that’s actually strong. Not that it hits harder than a magnum, because  it doesn’t.

The argument is that most people shoot it far better than they shoot a magnum. A .454 Casull kicks like a mule and takes a long time to get back on target. A big bore revolver gives you five or six rounds  and a long heavy trigger. A .45 gives you a manageable push, a fast recovery, and a magazine of rounds you can actually place.

There’s a comment under one of these videos that puts it better than I could. A grizzly can cover 50 yards in 3 seconds. In that window,  hits you can actually make are worth more than power you can’t control. That’s the  case, and it’s a good one. If the choice is a hand cannon you flinch through or a .

45 you can run clean, the .45 you can run clean is a real answer. Now let me deal honestly with the other side because there’s a strong version of the case against the .45, and you deserve to hear it. The bullet can  fail. A hard cast flat nose is a straight line penetrator on flesh, and it’ll  drive through a shoulder, but on heavy angled bone, a skull hit at the wrong angle, it can deflect instead of  punching through.

That’s a real failure mode, not a rumor. So, the honest claim isn’t that a .45  punches through anything. It’s that a well-placed hard cast round drives  deep through the body, and the skull shot on a big angry animal is not the shot  to bet your life on. There’s the reliability question, too. A revolver, if it goes click,  you pull the trigger again, and the cylinder turns.

A semi-auto that malfunctions at the worst possible second  is a different problem. That’s a real trade-off. The counter is capacity and speed, more rounds and faster follow-up, and both sides of that are legitimate. You’re weighing the semi-auto’s rounds and speed against the revolver’s dead simple reliability, and reasonable people land in different places.

And there’s cost, which is the one nobody wants to talk about. Good hard cast .45 runs you around $2 a round, sometimes  more. Running 100 rounds through your carry gun to make sure it feeds and functions with that exact load, and you should, gets expensive fast. That’s a real barrier, and it’s worth naming  because a load you’ve never actually fired a full magazine of is a load you’re guessing on.

So, >>  >> is a .45 ACP enough for a moose? As your only plan against a moose, no,  it’s not enough. And the reason isn’t the .45, it’s the animal. 1,600  lb of heavy boned animal is more than a handgun round should be asked to be the whole answer to, the same way it’s more than the study says you should count on against a big bear.

The hardware isn’t the weak link. The size of what you’re shooting is. But as the gun on your hip while you use your eyes and your legs the way you’re supposed to with a moose,  loaded with hardcast, run by someone who’s actually practiced with it, it’s a real fallback. It’s the same gun the man who makes the ammo carries every day in the woods, and he’s killed more animals than most of us will ever see.

He just  doesn’t pretend it’s a grizzly gun, and neither should you. The real answer to the guy on Reddit is the one nobody in the thread gave him. Carry the .45 if it’s what you’ll actually carry and actually train with, load it  right, and understand that with a moose, the gun is your last resort, and your judgment is your first one.

See the animal early. >>  >> Give it room. Put something solid between you. The pistol is there for the day all of that fails. >>  >> And if you’ve done the rest right, that day probably never comes. That’s the  honest version, not the biggest caliber wins, and not the .45 does everything.

The animal decides more than the gun does. The bullet matters more than the caliber, and the person behind it matters most of all. That’s the video. Your call on the subscribe button.