While an angry leopard is extremely dangerous and somewhat likely to hurt you, the most important thing to keep in mind when choosing your rifle, cartridge and bullet is the leopard's small size. A big, fully mature tom will weigh around 150 pounds. A cat 20 pounds lighter may be eminently shootable in some areas, and there are very few areas where cats over 180 pounds might be encountered. But even the rare 200-pound monster is not a large animal compared with elk, moose, buffalo and big bears.

Leopard cartridges, left to right: .270 Winchester, 7x57, 7mm Remington Magnum, .30-06, .300 Winchester Magnum. The leopard is a deer-size animal and is best taken with deer cartridges firing deer bullets.

There remain some African jurisdictions where a .375 is the minimum allowed by law for leopard. If this is the case, obey the law. There are other circumstances where a .375, or even larger, is the only rifle at hand and a leopard becomes available. If this is the case, use what you have. But in consciously choosing your leopard rifle, ignore what the wounded leopard might do to you and think about the ideal rifle, cartridge and bullet for a deer-size animal.

Bigger is not necessarily better. This is because first-shot accuracy is far more important than raw power and because deer-size animals are more effectively taken with deer cartridges and bullets than with cartridges shooting tough bullets designed for game many times larger.

I have personally shot six leopards--not a large number but enough to have opinions. It's a fact I'm not proud of, but nearly 30 years ago I lost the first leopard I shot. I hit him too high with a .375 H&H, and the next morning we lost the spoor. Had I hit him properly, of course, we would have recovered him.

Unlike most varieties of dangerous game, the leopard almost never attacks unless provoked. But if it's wounded or feels cornered it is the most likely of all dangerous game animals to hurt you.

Back then I thought a bigger hammer was always better. Today I'm much less sure of that. My .375 bullet apparently burned right through, doing little damage. Since we didn't recover him we don't know exactly where I hit him, but since he dropped to the shot and lay still for several seconds I can deduce that I creased the spine and stunned him, possibly doing little real damage. I have often wondered if the outcome would have been different if I'd been using a smaller caliber with a fast-opening deer bullet.

Your favorite deer rifle, whether it's a .270, 7mm, .30-06 or a fast .30, is a much better choice for leopard than a big gun. Nor do you need or want an extra-tough bullet. Plain old deer bullets in plain old deer cartridges work just fine. Africa being Africa, you probably want to choose a bullet that is tough enough for some range of game, but you still want that bullet to open up. Good choices, to my thinking, include the Nosler Partition and the new group of tipped and bonded bullets: Hornady InterBond, Nosler AccuBond and Swift Scirocco.

On a baited hunt in 2005 I used a .30-06 with a Scirocco and performance was perfect. The cat came in at very last light, and I took the safest shot at the largest target, the lung shot. The bullet was placed perfectly and expanded well, but the cat still went 30 yards. A couple of weeks later, in South Africa, another hunter wounded a leopard and I was invited on the follow-up with dogs. It ended in a charge, and we got the leopard stopped without injury.