SkeeterRonnie: Many years ago, when I was a teenager, I had a step-grandmother who was from Germany. She was a sweet little old lady, except the fact that she had a copy of Mein Kampf on the shelf seemed a little weird to me.
Anyway, she asked me to bring her a "big old rabbit" from the ranch so she could make a dish from the old country, called "hassenpfeffer". I tried to tell her she really didn't want that, but she kept after me, so I finally popped one for her--a really huge old jackrabbit. I skinned and gutted the thing and lugged it back to San Antonio for her. She clucked a lot about how tough it looked (I swear to you, the backstraps and hams looked like Arnold Schwartzenneger after a stiff steroid injection). But she ended up putting it in a pot with a bunch of veggies and gravy, and cooked it for what seemed like about 8 hours. When it came out, you could still barely cut it. She never asked me for another one.
Let's just say, this sucker didn't have cottonballs--more like titanium. Had it gotten lucky with a lady cottontail, the noise would have been more like a cotton gin exploding.
You know, I never told anyone this before, but when I shot that thing, it charged me. I swear. Luckily, I had a .30/06 and was able to keep my cool, and I put 3 more rounds into it before it landed at my feet, stone dead with a snarl still on it's face. I strapped it to the left fender of my forty-eight Chevy for the ride back home.
You just don't see them like that any more. I suspect that they all interbred with the sow feral hogs. I know that no matter what Al Gore may say, they were too tough to have succumbed to global warming.
Russ