Does Cartridge Selection Matter for Mountain Game?

For most people, hunting sheep and mountain goats is rare and expensive. So when you have a hunt of such magnitude planned, it’s normal to wonder—what’s the best sheep and mountain goat cartridge to use? That question has been keeping hunters like me on their toes for years.

Since the invention of smokeless powder, new cartridges and developments have been promoted for hunters. Some hunters embrace each new offering as the cartridge they’ve been waiting for. Others stick with what they know.

I’ve been hunting sheep for 18 years and have done a few mountain goat hunts as well. I’ve seen my hunting buddies take high-mountain game animals with various calibers. So, does caliber selection really matter when it comes to hunting sheep and mountain goats? Yes and no.

The Goal of Cartridge Selection

You want to pick a chambering that you can shoot accurately, will be adequate for the conditions, and will do enough damage to kill your target animal quickly and cleanly. With that in mind, almost any modern big-game cartridge has plenty of power to kill sheep and mountain goats cleanly when used responsibly.

There are certainly irresponsible choices. For example, I wouldn’t recommend taking cartridges in the .204, .223, or .300 BLK—you want a little more juice than those will give you. But when it comes to what’s adequate, a sheep hunter thinking they need a .280 Ackley Improved, a .300 WSM, or something even bigger or fancier to be successful is foolish.

Guys like Frank Glaser were killing sheep by the bushel with the once hot-rod .250-3000 Savage in the late nineteen-teens. Glaser claimed a .220 Swift killed hoofed game quicker than any other cartridge he’d ever tried (when the animals were hit with a solid lung shot). I think if you were considerate of wind conditions, the .22-250 with a hot 50-grain, copper ballistic tip would be dynamite on sheep.

Cartridge selection for sheep and mountain goats doesn’t matter that much. Any caliber deer rifle you have is perfectly capable of killing them cleanly under the right circumstances. But your choice of cartridge does matter in other ways.

Picking a Cartridge Isn’t Always Simple

A hunter must consider several factors in picking the cartridge they’ll depend on to get the job done. Shots on sheep and goats are often made in challenging wind conditions and at steep shot angles.

Tough or windy conditions don’t mean that you must have an ultra-efficient, high-B.C., modern cartridge—just that you need to understand how those conditions will affect your shot. The flip side is that fast cartridges with high-B.C. bullets offer a higher margin-of-error in challenging conditions.

Another advantage of some cartridges is that they are more efficient and can deliver great down-range performance with reduced recoil compared to many old favorites. One example is the 6.8 Western, which has only 5 percent less energy at 200 yards than a .300 Win Mag, with substantially less felt recoil. It’s a more compact cartridge with better ballistics.

In general, you’re going to want to select a rifle-cartridge combo that doesn’t beat you up and is easy enough to carry around the mountains.

Goats Can Be Hard to Kill

One factor that cannot be overlooked when selecting a cartridge to hunt sheep or goats with is the animal itself. Because sheep and goats are generally found in tough country, it’s common to think that both species are tough to kill.

For sheep—Dall sheep anyway—I’ve found them to go down easily. A ram might look unphased for a few seconds when hit through the lungs with a .300 WSM, but it’s a temporary deception—he isn’t going anywhere. I’ve seen quite a few rams pitch over backwards within a second or two of being hit with a 6.5 Creedmoor, and I’ve yet to see any ram hit solidly—with any rifle cartridge—make it more than a hundred yards.

Mountain goats are tougher. They have a reputation for soaking up lead, then using their last dying effort to hurl themselves from cliffs into the unrecoverable chasms below. From what I’ve seen, goats certainly are tougher than sheep, but much of their reputation has to do with the generally precarious spots they live in.

It doesn’t take much of a rifle to kill a mountain goat, but goats can also seem impossible to anchor. The most recent goat I killed was shot with a .300 Win Mag. At the shot she slumped down, acting like that would be it, then flung herself into the air and began tumbling down the nearly vertical mountainside.

For Goats, Bigger is Better—To a Point

Goat hunting often seems to boil down to finding a goat in a spot that you can successfully shoot and recover it. Sometimes, that recovery hinges on being able to keep the goat from running. Favoring more powerful cartridges will generally help you in this regard—just remember that it still can’t guarantee the outcome.

Many guides will tell hunters to bring the most powerful cartridge they can shoot comfortably—especially for goats. It’s not that these guides are worried about a smaller rifle being incapable, but that they’ve seen things go bad and welcome the extra margin-for-error that more powerful cartridges often provide. How much recoil a hunter can handle is all personal.

The more punch your cartridge can pack, the better the chances of anchoring a goat, but goats will be goats, and sometimes it seems nothing will stop them. Even our editor-in-chief, Alex Robinson experienced how tenacious goats can be when the goat he hit solidly took just a few steps too many.

Hunt the Situation

Picking the perfect sheep or goat cartridge is an ambiguous endeavor. There are many great options and even more that are totally adequate. Whatever mountain game cartridge you pick, remember that you’re hunting the situation as much as the animal itself. You need to find that big ram or billy under circumstances that will give you the best chance to kill and recover it cleanly and uneventfully.

There’s no shame in admitting that some newer cartridge that’s slightly more powerful—or more efficient, or easier to shoot—can increase the chances of a happy outcome.

So what should you choose then? Choose the sheep and mountain goat cartridge that makes you feel good. Seriously. Choose the cartridge/bullet/gun combination that gives you confidence. If you’ve got a lucky deer rifle that never misses, use that. If you’re a cartridge nerd, eat your heart out on ballistics tables, and pick the cartridge that gives you the greatest mathematical advantage—just make sure that you can shoot it well in a hunting scenario.

Writers like me often dive deep into the details of guns, gear, and cartridges, but I don’t ever lose sleep over which cartridge to choose for my own hunts—and neither should you.