There are many different kinds of .44 amunition. The average kind of expected wound can range greatly depending on what kind of ammunition was used.
I’m sure you have heard several different terms for the bullets such as: hollow point, wad-cutters, dum dums, polymer-tipped, Zombie loads, etc.
There are also various loads such as full load, partial load, extra load, etc.
By combining a specific bullet with a specific load, you can produce any number of results.
Your best bet is still never to shoot anyone. You can almost always expect to spend a very long period of time in prison if you do and you will almost certainly strongly regret that if it happens.
This is a story of a man who shot someone who invaded his home and stole something from the house. He wound up sentenced to a very long time in prison and the results of that were horrific.
It’s only a movie. But if you watch it, you will understand why I advise not to shoot anyone so strongly.
Even if they break into your home to rob you. If there is any way to avoid it, do not shoot anyone.
I have been shot with a 308 round. I can tell you from personal experience it ain’t fun. It went through the walls before it hit me, thank God. My dickhead brother was showing his friend the rifle and “dry shot” it, The guy didn’t check the chamber and it went off. It hit me through the abdomen, exited my side and tore the flesh off my left arm severing my ulnar nerve. It felt like getting hit by a tree trunk and the arm felt like it was on fire. The stomach muscles around the entrance wound contracted and I couldn’t breathe, barely. I still can’t stretch my left hand out normally. It was an out of body experience!!!
A co-worker many years ago had to dispose of his cat. It was vicious and would menace or attack strangers visiting. It attacked the paperboy a second time, badly scratching him. They put the cat in a garbage can and took it out of town to a quarry.
This guy would hunt moose up north, so he was using a 3-something-or-other rifle, I assume. From 150 feet or more he hit a fast-moving bounding cat. The front half of the cat was basically hamburger. If someone was hit in a limb or shoulder with one of these, there wouldn’t be enough to bother attaching. (One of his buddies committed suicide with such a rifle, when they went to pick up the couch he said they found brain matter under the arm that the cleanup crew missed. So things went flying all over. I don’t imagine the cleanup was any picnic.)
I’ve helped him retrieve a moose once, and there was no significant external damage to that - but we’re talking about an animal with a barrel chest about 4 to 5 feet in diameter. We didn’t bother opening the ribcage to look.
In case anyone’s still having trouble imagining this, I suggest you watch the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination (No, I’m not posting a link.) The bullet that hit Kennedy was a 6.52 mm - smaller than a.308, and it was fired from 266 feet away.
Haven taken part in the “post mortem examination” of many big game animals, shot with .308, .30-06 or similar rounds I can tell you what you would have found. It the bullet didn’t hit any bones, the entrance and exit wounds are often small, only about the size of a finger poke. But any organs in about a 6 inch diameter cylinder around the bullet’s path are reduced to mush or for muscle a sort of red jelly. If bone is hit the bullet and bone fragments expand out in a cone that can decapitate a good size deer. Soccer ball sized exit wounds.
A hit can be survivable as Porterk1970 says, but the wounds are major and permanent. A hit to the head or upper torso would almost always be immediately fatal.
“The bullet went into the front of my left leg and came out just at the crack of my bottom about two inches to the left of my rectum. It was fired at about 50 m so made a hole about the size of a [silver] dollar where it came out.”
George Patton was machine-gunned in 1918 while strolling into battle (armed with a walking stick, like Chinese Gordon), probably by a 7.92×57mm Mauser, , a round similar to the .30-06. As you know, the 1903 Springfield that loaded the latter was a reverse-engineering of the Gewehr 98 that shot the former
“ Patton wrote home to tell his wife that he was ‘missing half my bottom but otherwise all right.’”
Me, I’ve been hit with a 12-gauge diabolically loaded with lard, lye and rock salt, and that was enough for me to mend my ways.
Simo Häyhä, finland’s most successful sniper, was shot in the face from 20 meters with a
7.92×57mm Mauser bullet. They originally though he was dead but he somehow survived. Left with very nasty facial industries but lived to 96. Picture of him afterwards in the wiki link below. Simo Häyhä
The moose was able to charge out of the river into the bush about 30 yards before it collapsed. So those must be some hearty animals. Not sure if there was an exit wound. We started skinning it, and at a certain point it slid down the slope when the carcass was sufficiently detached from the slimy inner skin.
Don’t even ask about 4 moose legs and 4 people in a 14 foot boat. (" Slow down! Water’s coming in over the front.") It’s a wonder we survived. The moose didn’t.