What are small critters that in your opinion are tough /hard to kill.

My vote would be coons.

Chucks

Coons, tiny brain and hard to find. Even when you do hit it they twitch all over the place for 15-30 seconds.

Cats.

gray squirrels can be kind of tough. i've seen them take a load of shot and head for zee hills. also seen them cling to a tree for a while and then drop. but not much can take a CCI mini-mag in the brain

Yep. My vet says the same. Sees cats survive some bad stuff.

The secret to killing small critters is ; 1] get real close , 2] shoot them with a 25-06 - 75gr. Vmax bullet .
It's worked for me quite a few times .

Feral house cats Rio7

Red wasps

A poorly shot cat has much extra life!

Badger

Cockroaches

I remember the 80's tv show - That's Incredible - a cat fell from a 20-30? story building - nipped a fire escape handrail on the way down - hit a canvas awning that was at a 45* angle to shed water - that shot the cat into traffic where it was ran over by a car . Cat lived and was there on the show no worse for wear .

I watched a coon take a few shots from a 9mm with very little reaction. Darn thing just kept clinging to the side is the tree and looking at us.

you're wearing the wrong boots

Frogs. Toughest SOB's ever created. You can gig em, club em, cut off their legs, and they still act like nothing ever happened.

My Grandpa & Uncle were coon hunters - I've seen them pump numerous 22shorts into a coon 25-30' up a tree - - - finally they'd flop out of the tree .

truth

Squirrels

Midget zombies

Fly

house cats

Red velvet cow ant

Bats on the wing.

No question about the Red Velvet ant. Try stomping one to death on a sand hill. Not sure it can be done.

Chupacabras

Ours has been hit twice, both times in the head, and is missing several teeth. One hit messed up his jaw, the other his upper palate, so he has to consciously close his mouth a lot of the time. Other than that, he pretty much acts the same as normal. The dogs give him a wide berth and he's all of 9lbs. A boar coon came in the cat-door on the screened porch a few weeks back and couldn't find his way back out fast enough with that little cat all over him.

Armadillos hit through the chest with a .38 or 9mm show amazing endurance. 5.56ing them is much more decisive.

Democrats

Yep. Tough sumbitches.

Rancid from the jump.

🦫

Yep, just gotta wait 'til they stop leaking red juice, then pretty soon gravity wins.


You're doing it wrong. Throw a thumb sized rock in the air and let them suicide on it. Bats can "see" size but not density. Usually it stuns them, doesn't kill them, but after they hit the ground you can finish 'em with your boots.

Tom

Yep, stomp him on rocks and he just keeps on keeping on.

Coons. This one was “dead” from a .22 to the head about an hour before. Anyone ever climb into the back of a truck with a topper and beat one into submission with an axe handle? It ain’t easy

screen shot in windows

A Badger will give all the rimfire calibers a run for there money.

Chiggers...

LOL. Sounds like a Jerry Clower story.

Still have Dad’s original Red Ryder From the 1940’s.

Opossums are very hard to kill....

possum, no brain to hit.

My BiL and I would walk on cold sunny days and shoot coons out sunning on limbs. We got 25-30 bucks for them in the early 80's.
We both had surplus alice packs for hauling them.
He had a "dead" coon come back to life in the bag, wish I video of him and that coon rolling around.

Tsetse flies.

Elkmtb: I have shot WAY more than my share of "chucks" and "coons" and they don't hold a candle to the lead a big boar Badger can pack!
Hold into the wind
VarmintGuy

Vaseline and a pliers.


Or is that the bot fly?

Skeeters

And a mud vein a mile wide.

Rasputin.

Ticks.

If squirrels got to 100 pounds, you would need a cannon to kill em.

Groundhogs can be tough too.
Have walked up to where I shot one and seen chunks all over.
Blood spattered everywhere and a nice wide trail to the hole.
Could here them breathing still.

Woodchuck, I've spun those suckers around in a circle with a 410 and they keep right on running.

Snapping turtles? When I was a kid I shot a snapper through the neck with a .22 LR and watched a caliber size stream of blood pump from that hole. I went on and some time later came back and that turtle had crawled about 150 yards to a pond pumping blood all the way. Catfish seem to be able to hang on out of the water for a surprising amount of time.

My vote is for fleas. You can try to mash one between thumb and finger all you want then watch it merrily jump away. Ticks come in a close second.

A lot of flying insects will take off and fly if their head is cut off - typically only in a straight line though. My grandfather used to pull the heads off the grasshoppers in our yard whenever he came around - they'd fly straight and even gain altitude if they came head onto a wall, and then fly over the top and then straight.


This wasp even tops that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LmdmltW-XU

I vote cat.

Head shot will anchor them, anything else and they’re gone.

I'll take all you got plus any mouse eatin' snakes to get rid of the rodents that do the most damage.

Plus anything that eats stink bugs. They're hard to get rid of too.

Kids, and I gave them every opportunity. They are in their 30's now. Ungrateful, still, too.

Boat swampings ( they refer to my old trustworthy 1972 boat as "the submersible". Once, Ty was hoping for a helicopter rescue.), living in bear habitat with bears regularly through the yard, "moose hunts", mama moose giving birth to calves in the yard, driving rain storms on camping trips ("just lay there- I don't care if your are in a puddle of water, we need the weight for the tent not to blow away!" ) , trips to the remote cabin which they for some reason term "survival trips", leaving them alone in malls (damn- they have good directional skills!), fishing trips to remote lakes when they had chicken pox. etc.

They know "deal with it!"

I like to think of myself as a good parent..... What the hell - I tried and failed - they will make it, whatever.

Coons & cats for sure.

MM

The doubt's and fears in our own minds.

Feral cat

I heard bed bugs were tough to kill.

Ex-wives. Both large and small.

🦫

Crotch Crickets, my pards grandpa called em Kansas City Fleas!!

You ain’t wrong. Can’t kill em and damn tough to beat in court if they have a decent lawyer and aren’t completely nuts.

Pound for pound nothing touches a big male feral cat. I shot a Tom last year running across the pasture. Three solid center punches from lead 5’s and he still made it to the fence. Unreal.

I try to lung timber cats, sometimes they show back up

As a younster, I shot a huge male cat in our barn. Dad wanted him gone, as he was hard on young kitties kept around for rat control.

I was in the hay loft, cat raised his head, caught a 150 gr. wheel weight cast SWC from my K-38, square in the mouth. Blew out the the back of his skull. DOA, of course.

I dragged that thing out of the barn and when I held him by the back legs, his nose drug the ground. He must have weighed 25-30 pounds, one of the biggest cats I've ever seen, for sure the biggest one I ever shot. Dad was pleased.

DF

Good times.

Reminds me of spending time at my grandparents cabin with my Ruger 10/22 and Weaver K4 or grandpas single shot revolver loaded with rat shot and bringing all of my trophies back to show grandpa and hound him to buy me another brick of ammo.

I’ve put a 45 in the head and two in the body and a big coon in a trap and he just sat there and looked at me. Tried to crawl up the tree. When you see the tail start swinging the end is near.

Your loads zucked

Scorpione's

Anything in the weasel family. Fisher cats are pretty tough per lb too.

Beavers are tough.

Nothings tough against a 44.mag or .3” 12 gauge with 00.
But a leg hold trap and a stout stick will show you what is.

Geese are pretty tough.

Muskrat aren’t daisys

Damn straight we are.

👊🏽😬🦫

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.

Yeah,I can see that. A pre -64 375 H&H is mo better,

Also had a couple beavers trying to make a habit of damming the ranch's irrigation system. If you break the dam in the evening you can walk back up in the pitch black of the morning and blast the beavers at daybreak with a 20 ga Wingmaster LW loaded with #6 pheasant loads.

They aren't tough to kill. You just have to be out of bed by 5:00AM.

I don't like to get up that early.

Fascinating. I didn’t include them in my tough list because I have found exactly the opposite - they move like tree sloths. Fall quickly to ANY round, and rely on their defensive mechanisms (quills) to make up for all their lack of nutz or ferocity. [bleep], I’ve curb-stomped a couple of them to death. In the right attire.

Not Tough. Just seriously problematic. Especially with dogs.

Geese aren’t just Tough, they’re friggin NASTY. Hard, I says.

Ermin. Mink. Otter

Very tough

Ermine. Prob not much bigger than a Red squirrel and smaller
Than a fat gray. But wayyyyy meaner than either. Tough as nails.take that proverbial ‘Nantucket sleigh ride’ on the backs of critters 4x their body weight. Or more. Mean little things.

I must have gotten lucky with the one badger I found it necessary to terminate.

Some thirty years ago, we were in the yard at my Mom's house and spied a big old badger waddling across the adjoining pasture.

Then I see the old deaf retired red heeler cow dog had winded the badger. The dog was too deaf to call him back. But Mom kept a Glenfield model 60 inside the door to her house. I asked Mom to hand me her rifle and I placed one 40 gr hp just behind the badger's ear from 50 yds, about 2 seconds before the dog got there.

One trip to the vet prevented.

Caught a porcupine in the yard that had been eating the bark on one of our apple trees, all I could get my hands on before he got into the sagebrush was about a 5' long fence board.
He was kinda hard to kill but I was determined and successful. Had to kill a rattlesnake the same way one day he almost made it to the brush too.
That was some of the reasons I bought the NAA 22LR that has been in my front pocket ever since

Use enough gun. a .375 H &H with 270 gr bullets works great! Trust me....

Badgers

This. Cow Killers are some bad muther luvers....