Ft-lbs are not a good measure of a round's effectiveness against game--even though, I believe, some state laws are written as if they were. A heavy bullet load that would be a much better choice in 357 will not produce as high a number as a light bullet load because velocity, but not bullet weight, is squared in the formula for ft-lbs. A 125 grain load, however, will not penetrate deeply enough to reliably kill an animal like a bear, no matter how fast it goes. The fact that it's going so fast actually works against it in this regard, because of the likelihood that the bullet will expand rapidly in the shallow tissues of the animal (i.e., not the deep vital organs) and thus 'put on the brakes' by dumping energy into a shallow and wide rather than deep and relatively narrow wound channel.
