Thread: Who got the last laugh? You decide

Originally Posted by Micky Duck

also being farmland.....use your phone and the topo50 app.....too easy to get ranges within cooee using it...by the sounds of it you have the time to do so..even if sitting and glassing from say spotX workout where say 250 yards is around you and know you can point and shoot anywhere inside that....and be confident of a fatal hit.

That’s a good one too. When doing rabbit control on lifestyle blocks, safe backstop is limited, which equals limited opportunities, which can be partially mitigated sometimes by taking longer shots or at least having good inside knowledge of different distances on the property and where a .22 can reach from, to hit rabbits that predominantly present in the same places.

I use measuring tools on GIS maps and measure different distances between various different landmarks on the property. Then on the day I know distance from ‘driveway’ to ‘old man pine’ is 70yd so I don’t need to waste any time beaming the rangefinder across. Also very useful for night shooting when it’s hard to use the range finder.

For night shooting, in one rocky paddock I stacked little cairns at 25 yd intervals on one useful shooting lane. Old school, but it worked.


I do use my rangefinder a lot. While I do use it for ballistics regularly, I mainly just use it to confirm an animal is within ‘aim directly and shoot’ range. Second most common job for it is to confirm if the animal is within ‘can I be bothered going all the way over there’ range. Another sometimes use is if I shoot something in scrub and it looks like it could be a tricky find, note the landmark at shooting position. Once on position of the animal if you can’t find it, range back to the shooting position. Yes this only confirms that you are somewhere on the same arc as the animal was when the gun went bang, you can have infinitely more confidence than if it confirmed you are on a different arc with a difference in diameter of 50yds or more.
Within the hobby there are lots of gimmicks and shiny gadgets out there that are designed to suck money from our pockets, but I don’t put range finders in that category.