When we had Jack Rabbits, they were great practice for hunting season. When I first moved to Wyoming (1985) we had a lot of “Jacks”. I would walk the sage brush areas, “kick them up”, and shoot them on the run! Our “Jacks” all but disappeared by the early 1990’s, and haven’t made a come-back yet! memtb
I grew up in SE Colorado. In the late '50's- early '60's, we were overrun with jackrabbits- at night with a spotlight, you could see thousands of them in our hayfields. With my little Mossberg 342K .22, I got so good at shooting them on the run, kicking them up as you say, that I rarely missed one within 50 yards. This became nearly a daily occurrence, as they were within easy walking distance of our house. We jump-shot them in the daytime, and at night, we spotlighted them. We would load our night's kill in my Dad's pickup truck, and the next day he would drop them off at the rendering plant- I think they ended up as dog food. We got a bounty of 5 cents per rabbit, IIRC.
Then, around '62, they contracted Tularemia, and a mass die-off followed. Soon, there was not a Jack to be found! They never came back, at least in the former numbers.
