Thread: just Varminting - how far was your longest shot on your last walk

Originally Posted by 257weatherby

Hard to argue with that.

I'd disagree. Rabbits are vermin like many other creatures, ones that we trap, poison and shoot, with varying degrees of success. I spent a good few weeks in '86 smacking myxomatosis rabbits with a cricket bat, that wasn't a very nice way for us to get rid of them either, eh? Every winter I trap rats that aren't cleanly killed, when they run over the traps the wrong way. Shit happens. I don't differentiate between a rabbit, a rat or a ferret polecat hybrid. They must die.

In the cattle yards where I was shooting rabbits a couple of nights ago, the buggers were popping up out of holes in the middle of the holding paddock and smack bang in the centre of the yards. Wanna argue with the cockie about a rabbit versus a $2000 Angus cattle beast's leg? Nope, neither do I. That's reserved for the snowflake greenie bunny huggers.

I totally get your desire to see a clean kill, we all strive for that, sometimes however the circumstances are what they are. On a warren that isn't shot often, if at all, I think you can achieve good numbers with a CCI Stinger or a small centrefire like a .17 Hornet, for a while, but once they're wise to the bang, you have no choice but to go into stealth mode. Just the way it is.

Not looking for a great big barney over this, but in my (40yrs-ish) experience of shooting bunnies with rimfire, the numbers that suffer much beyond a couple of minutes are very low. I'd rather shoot them with a small percentage of slower deaths than poison all of them and the horrors that entails. Or deliberately infect them with a guaranteed horrible death virus.