Porcupines: not hard if you are armed with max loaded 357 125 gr JHP. Beware of raining quills.
Very difficult if one is armed only with a fist sized rock.
Summer of 1981: I was employed to irrigate and care for a small (two or three sections) ranch. It had about 100 acres of irrigated alfalfa hay. A wild fire had burned off several tens of thousands of acres of the BLM Range Lands around the ranch. Porcupines were migrating into the hayfields from the burned off rangeland.
The landowner had instructed me to kill any porcupine in the hayfields and remove them, as porcupine quills baled into a hay bale are lethal to cattle.
I owned no handguns at the time. And often it was inconvenient to carry a big game rifle while doing ranch chores.
Occasionally I would stumble across one of the big rodents with nothing more lethal than a rock. The suckers tend to curl up in a ball and hide their head when pelted with a rock. They are invulnerable until their back is broken and then they expose their head.
It was the worst, ugliest chore I ever had to perform working around livestock, and that is saying something.
