It seems hard to discredit the concept that wadcutter bullets have more deadly terminal effect than round-nose bullets, and silly to try. There are too many accounts of actual effect on animals, going back for many decades.
One that I remember from quite a while ago was from a guy trying to shoot some porqupines out of his trees (before they gnawed them to shreds). He shot one with several round-nose .38 Special bullets, but did not dislodge it. He then used a much less powerful .38 wadcutter, because he ran out of the regular .38 Special loads. The porqupine feel with the first wadcutter. Comparing the wounds, he realized that the wadcutter did much more damage.
One comparison that I had happen to me involved an airgun with round-nose and cup-point pellets (which did not actually expand). I shot a squirrel right through both lungs (close to if not actually hitting the heart) with the round-nose, knocking it onto its back, only to see it thrash around, then jump onto its feet and dash into the brush. Later I saw it hopping around with big bulges of skin just behind both forelegs. It lived for weeks, at least. I was using that round-nose pellet because it was substantially more accurate than the other designs that I tried (1 hole at 50' using a rest and scope). But, I switched to the cup-points for pests after that (about 0.3" groups at 50'). The first squirrel I shot with the cup-points in essentially the same place. That pellet did not expand and did not exit, and the squirrel went down, thrashed for about 10 seconds, and was dead.
So, I am a believer that a wide, flat bullet will do a heck of a lot more damage to a living target than is done by a bullet of the same diameter with a more "streamlined" nose.
It really doesn't matter whether the bullet is hard-cast lead or a non-expanding jacketed or solid type, so long as the nose is the same shape. However, it is usually possible to get higher muzzle velocity from a hard-cast lead bullet than from a jacketed bullet in a magnum revolver, while staying within the SAAMI limit on peak pressure. More velocity at the target gives more wound channel width, and a greater lethality to the target.
The trouble with non-expanding bullets occurs when they hit something that offers little resistance, like just skin and lung tissue on a broadside shot, and exit the far side without expending much of their energy making a wound channel inside the animal. In that case, an EXPANDING bullet will do more damage. But, that is really just a more streamlined bullet that CONVERTS TO A MORE-THAN-BORE-DIAMETER BLUNT BULLET when it hits the animal. If you use a large diameter bullet to begin with, such as a .45 or .475, expansion is not so necessary.
And, as for bullet fit vs accuracy, please read the recent article in Handloader about "duplicating old round-nose bullet loads." It pretty clearly demonstrates that round-nose bullets are beneficial to accuracy when bullet fit is not ideal, as was often the situation in the early days of the revolver (and current days for the Colt SAA). As the author points out, round-nose bullets are great if all you want to do with them is hit metal targets or punch Cowboy Action Shooting paper targets.
SL1
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