I say again, with a 1:8 barrel, the 223 can shoot 80-grain bullets and that makes it a totally different animal for the purpose of hunting.I still wouldn’t want to try to kill a moose or an elk with it but anything short of that it should kill pretty easily. Something like that would also be ideal for hog hunting where you’re trying to kill enough hogs to actually be doing a farmer some sort of service and you’d be using a semiauto rifle with a 20-round magazine.