Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game Have you ever heard a cottontail scream?

I shot one with a paintball gun once in the back hip. He jumped about 5 feet straight up in the air and screamed until he was out of earshot.

KC: I was maybe 11 or 12 years old when I heard my first Cottontail Rabbit "scream"!
I was sound asleep one summer, early morning, with my bedroom window open. My bedroom was right over the family garden plot and the "screaming" woke me up - I had NO idea what it was.
I look out my window to see a Cottontail Rabbit flopping and half jumping right below me. And to my amazement I also see a Weasel with a jaw death grip on the Cottontails throat!
This went on for a couple of minutes until I could get my trusty Remington bolt action Model 511 Scoremaster 22 L.R. and whacked the Weasel amidships. The Rabbit did not survive the attack from that Weasel either.
At the shot the rest of my family arose as they had been awakened by the "screams" of that Cottontail. We were all puzzled and stunned at the noise and by the attack by the much smaller Weasel on the Cottontail.
Nature!
Hold into the wind
VarmintGuy

Had rabbits around the farm when I was a kid, both domestic, cottontails and hybrids of the two. Had a pair of weasels all but wipe them out one time. Heard several bunnies do their death scream. Hard to imagine such a sound coming from such a cute lil fur ball.

Some of the best trout fishing in the midwest...

We used to spend a week or so a couple of times each summer there. Maybe every third night we'd go to the Winchester in Waterville to relive toilets and running water, as well as great food...
Wish someone would open that place up....

I ran a trap line back in high school. I would get up early to check the traps in the dark before going to school. Sometimes there would be a rabbit in a leg hold trap that I was using for coon. The screams were enough to just about make a teen age boy piss his pants while trying to dispatch the rabbit with a club and a flashlight in the dark woods.

Many times

Yes. As a kid I used to set rabbit boxes and sometime when you pulled them out of the box they’d scream bloody murder.

Harpers Ferry is just down the road as well. ON Saturday night the American legion has bingo. It may not be as much fun as using a real toilet but it's not bad.

kwg

A buddy and I were in my boat once anchored just off the bank while Night fishing for flathead catfish, it was around 2 am in perfect quiet except for the sound of the river trickling bye.

It was a nearly cloudless moon light night, not hot.. just the slightest breeze…

Trees / woods along side of the river which is only 80 yards wide, with train tracks running on top of a bluff on one side of the river…

Just plain peaceful…


THEN - a piercing scream of a rabbit around 50 yards away, a coyote or fox must have pinned it and couldn’t kill it because the heinous sounds of the rabbit slowly being murdered went on for nearly 30 minutes… it felt like hours.

Could have been a big snake ? Which is the only reason I didn’t take the boat over to end the horror movie we got plunged into… WOW - we still remember it pretty vividly.

Interesting thing about rabbits distress scream...

They scream out of fear, not pain.

I know that for a fact.

It’s hare raising for sure! 😳

When I was a kid, my parents raised Golden Retrievers. We had this one dog that had a real soft mouth. She would catch baby rabbits and bring them into the house and spit them out on the kitchen floor alive. Then you'd have to catch them and take them outside. There was always a lot of squealing going on.

I liberated a farm raised rabbit IVO Baghdad Iraq one hot summer day in 2003. That damned thing squeeled like mad. My ears were ringing afterwards. Since I had to stretch my arm out a good ways to snag it from the rear of it's cage all I could grab was it's ears. Once I pulled it from the cage I used my other hand to grip it by the neck and silenced it. I'm glad I was wearing tough leather gloves used for handling concertina wire. It was kicking and scratching me like mad until it ran out of oxygen. My friends and I cooked it over an open fire. We ate like kings that night. Fresh meat was a delicacy after eating MREs for weeks on end.