About 2008 I emptied my S&W 30-1 into a strange acting raccoon that was stumbling around the carport of our mountain house. Several torso shots failed to kill it; so I put the last few into it's head. This was a mixture of various LRN and WC .32 S&W and Long ammo. In all fairness, this animal was nearly the size of a first grader. I was less than impressed.
Mag Tech and Buffalo Bore make modern SD loads in .32 S&W Long that work better than the ammo I used that day. That said, I love .32 handguns for their accuracy and light recoil. I have seven around here now.
I actually witnessed a similar occurrence involving a rabid raccoon on my front porch and a .38 S&W.
One morning there was a commotion on the porch in which my brother had stepped outside, saw the rabid raccoon and hurriedly scrambled back inside the house.
Worried that it would attack/infect somebody else in the neighborhood, my brother grabbed an old Iver Johnson top-break .38 S&W revolver off the mantle above the fireplace, went out the front door, circled around the house to the back porch, took aim and shot the raccoon in the torso. The raccoon barely flinched, it just stood up and started shambling away, so my brother emptied the whole 5-shot cylinder into the raccoon, then retreated because it still didn't stop it.
Later that day we found that it had crawled under a tarp we had over a pile of firewood and eventually succumbed to its wounds.
The most shocking part though was the state of the raccoon and the porch where it had been. We noticed that it had bled very little despite the fact that every shot was a hit, (although that could partially be due to dehydration) and also that all of the bullets had stopped inside of it because there were no exit wounds on the raccoon, nor were their any holes on the porch. And this wasn't a particularly large raccoon, mind you.
For reference, the raccoon had been shot with a total of 5 .38 S&W (not to be confused with .38 Special) lead round nose bullets, all of which stopped inside of it's body. I've seen .22LR pass straight through raccoons before.
So yeah, if anybody ever wonders why certain older cartridges such as .32 S&W or .38 S&W fell out of favor, it's because apparently they were so absurdly week that they can't even drop a raccoon with a full cylinder dump.
In addition, this is way caliber wars regarding the effectiveness of modern Self-Defense cartridges are so stupid. Because cartridges which were actually ineffective no longer have firearms chambered for them.
