At the Aguila booth this year, Luis showed me their new packaging for the relaunch of their 22LR shotshell cartridges, renamed “Rata”, spanish for rat. Aptly named as this speciality cartridge was designed for dispatching fast moving pests at close range. Rata is unique in that it uses #10 bird shot, which are larger balls than their competitors such as CCI and Federal.
Because of the low recoil energy of this shells loading, this round does not cycle reliably in semi-auto firearms and should be used single-shot or in revolvers. Luis provided me with their gun range ballistics gel footage showing how effective it is in squirrel sized target. While not immediately obvious due to the small shot size and clear gel, on closer review of the footage, you can see multiple concurrent hits on the gel and an obvious transfer of energy. That varmint is d-e-a-d.
