30-06 not suited for sheep?? Really??? That is the silliest thing I have heard today... An accurate rifle shooting 150g going 2900fps or 130g at 3000fps and you have a perfectly good sheep gun. Is there better options out there? Probebly... The "cool" "latest" "greatest" caliber the last few years seems to be the 280 AI which is based on the 30-06 case. If I had a good dependable, well shooting, reasonably lightweight 30-06 I would load up some 150g NP, or maybe even 130g TSX and start worring more about how to drag my out of shape butt up the mountian than about if a 30-06 is going to kill a sheep if I get there.
+ another
My first centerfire rifle was a .30-06. Back then I loaded 150 grain Hornady and Sierra cup and core bullets at 3,000 fps. For about 10 years, many mule deer, pronghorn antelope, and a few elk fell to those bullets from that rifle. I shot some of those animals at distances greater than the distances that I shot any of my sheep.
For many of the years that I hunted with a .30-06, I wished that I had a 7 mm Remington magnum, mainly because of all of the praise many of the outdoor writers were giving that cartridge back then. But when I would compare the ballistics of the .30-06 vs 270 Win vs 7 RM they were so close that I couldn't justify the cost of a new rifle. I doubt that any animal shot with either of those cartridges could tell the difference either. I now also have rifles in .270 Win and 7 mm RM, and I still think their ballistics are too close to tell much difference.
I was lucky enough to have lived in Montana when we could buy a bighorn sheep tag every year (for $25), and we could hunt them every year. So for 10 or so years I did that. It took me several years before I finally shot my first ram, but after I kind of figured them out, I killed 3 1/2 rams. These were all DIY and mostly solo hunts. The 1/2 ram was a legal (3/4 curl) ram that I saw one year but because I had killed a full curl ram the previous year, I passed him up. I was on a ledge above him and I picked up a walnut size rock, threw it underhand and hit him. He then ran up the avalanche chute we were in to where a woman on a guided hunt gut shot him. The ram then ran back past me, dragging his small intestines in the ground. I didn't want to see him suffer more, so I followed him to the next avalanche chute and killed him. I then found the other hunter, her guide, and the outfitter and took them to her ram.
I killed all of my bighorn rams and a Canadian Dall ram with my .257 Ackley shooting 117 grain Sierra GameKing bullets. The longest shot was the Dall ram at 206 lasered yards. The scope that I've always had on that rifle is a 6x Leupold. The only other sheep that I have shot are a west Texas Aoudad and a New Zealand Arapawa ram. I shot both of those rams with my .300 Weatherby shooting 168 grain TSX and TTSX bullets. All of my sheep were one shot kills.
My point with all of this rambling is that sheep hunting does not necessarily mean 600+ yard shooting. Oh, and one of my Golden Retrievers was by my side when I shot 3 of those bighorn rams.
Probably the greatest new product in long range shooting/hunting is in optics. With external dials for distance and windage that are calibrated for your rifle and bullet to take out all of the guesswork of holding over your target.
With the costs of todays sheep hunts in the $30-100,000 range, maybe one of those new long range scopes would be cheap (?) insurance. One could even be calibrated to a .30-06.
