Originally Posted By: Geo. Newbern
I did a lot of rabbit hunting as a kid and teenager. We steered away from the heavy shot sizes because they 'homogenized' the guts too bad. Seven and a halfs seemed right to me...Geo


Geo, you weren't making rabbit ortolan, were you? grin I always took the guts out of my rabbits before cooking and eating them. How badly shot up they are is always a function of shot size, shot charge, choke density, and range. And the same goes for choice of shot size for game birds. Like shooting early season grouse when there is still a lot of leaf cover, quite a few rabbits are shot in high grass and weeds where larger pellets penetrate the cover better.

As Miller says, it doesn't take much to kill a cottontail rabbit. When I was a teen, I once decided to shoot a rabbit with my pump-up Benjamin .177" pellet rifle. I didn't want to kill it because it was in a residential neighborhood, and neighbors were outside. I only wanted to sting him to discourage him from remaining in the area near the garden. So I only gave the rifle two pumps which probably gave a muzzle velocity less than 300 fps. Since he was about 100 feet from the garage, I held about a foot over his back because I knew the pellet would drop at least that far at that low velocity. When I popped him, he jumped about three feet straight into the air and came down stone dead. That's one of those shots you never forget. I can't imagine that the pellet even penetrated his skin at that range and velocity. I found no sign of a wound. He probably died from a heart attack.

Voting for anti-gun Democrats is dumber than giving treats to a dog that shits on a Persian Rug