No fox but supper is sorted

WalkedUp said:

It is great fun, I hate waste so only shoot them when there is demand for the meat. If the numbers get too high the farmers get unhappy and then, I feel, that disease outbreaks are more common and disastrous. As I have AOLQ it is good training too, deer numbers are lower here as almost any other part of the country. Being able to hit bull after bull from a bench in the day is one thing. Hitting them half asleep at night is another. The delay on the last of my triple was that I lovely had the rifle, M591, set up for a fox so two rounds loaded. Not the sort of mistake you would make when awake. The more you shoot at night the more accomplished you get at these things. The biggest change to my night shooting of rabbits in the last 25 years has been the quad sticks. Great I get a safe angle, above long grass and quick to deploy. I’m only an average shot at best and so you have to give yourself as many advantages as possible!

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WalkedUp said:

I am slightly annoyed with myself for not taking photos of them properly butchered today. They were for my uncle and he was genuinely delighted. The meat was in excellent condition and looked as good as I have seen.

Digger is a huge man, or at least he always was in my mind. About 6’4” and seeming twice as wide when I was a child. Age has reduced him to about my height now, but he’s still 130kg to my 80 and so has a hearty appetite for good meat. He buried his wife last week, so this was as much an excuse to spend some time with him as anything else. He came to my office in the city centre and was in very good form. The end of a line sadly, but has always been my favourite of my mother’s twelve siblings.

On the carcasses themselves, the head damage was significant. Effectively nothing remained structurally intact, just a ragged sock of skin and ears. I tried to present them as respectfully as possible in the photos, conscious of previous discussions on SD about not providing ammunition to antis, but in reality they were close to decapitated.
When paunching I removed the loose facial tissue to tidy them up. No bone cutting was required.

In my experience the limiting factor is the size of the rabbit’s head rather than the cartridge. On larger animals the same round is still highly destructive, just scaled accordingly. Chest shooting rabbits with this setup invariably leaves very little recoverable meat, even picking up enough parts to use as fox bait is tedious.

For rabbits I generally prefer the .17 HMR, but I have managed to misplace both magazines, which is particularly irritating. I distinctly remember finding one in a coat after lamping and thinking I would put it somewhere safe. That has, predictably, achieved the opposite.
This may open the usual debate, but all of my rifles are conditioned AOLQ. Where it is safe and reasonable, I will often carry a heavier cartridge across mixed species rather than travel with multiple rifles. I turned down 90% of the rabbits I saw last night, only slipping the trigger when my foxing felt finished and the land dished suitably for a shot.

Long boring reply… I’m babysitting tonight and up early in the morning.

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