Evilv

Thanks lads. The committee would pass a motion tomorrow morning if I asked them to. There is unanimity on getting rid of them. We just need to go through the process of voting for a motion. They are sick of having cleared the land, brought on seedlings and having the lot nipped off in a night. I've planted my plot twice already. I would NEVER use a rimmy there - not in a million years. I could never guarantee or even expect that a richocheting shot or a shot through a rabbit would stop at the fence. I wouldn't even use a 12 ft pound rifle. It could go through the fencboards as an outside possibility. These are young naiive rabbits and are easy to get near. I'd stake their burrow out (under an old shed) and pop them from twleve or fifteen yards with a B4 rifle. I have a Webley Axsor pcp and a CZ .22 rimmy, but they are overkill and too powerful for the area. There is a B4 in the cupboard which my sons have shot many a young rabbit with at suitable range. As for the council authorising shooting - never in a million years would they do that. BUT - it is OCCUPIERS of land that have the responsibility to destroy rabbits and the entitlement to do it by shooting. We as an allotment association are in EXACTLY the same position as Farmer Brown the tennant of Lord Poshbastardly-Smythe. You don't get permission from the 'Laird' you get t from the tennant. Police take that view too. Most of my farms are tennants, and their written permissions are from them as the 'occupiers' of land. Plod is happy with that. I will talk to the FLO and see what they think. As it is, the ******* are breeding faster than we can get them in these cage traps. I don't want to try snares in case a cat comes by - it could happen easily that I'd get the wrong species in a snare - also, I don't like inhumane stuff like that. A pill in the head is a different matter though.

Hi. I'm secretary of an allotment society in a large northern city. Our allotments are situated far away from houses and surrounded by a public park in a valley and skirted by a small river. The area around is well wooded. We have a rabbit problem developing down there with about eight young rabbits roaming about and destroying our crops. As a firearms certificate holder and regular shooter on farmland with .2 rimfire and standard .22 air rifle, I have the ability to deal with these rabbits, but I am MOST reluctant to take an airgun down to the site and do the job that way. I'd love too, and could sort them out in one evening or early morning foray, but I'd hate to have some passerby get wind of what I'm up to and call in a swat team and police helicopter. There are solid six and a half foot high fences, but I might be seen from higher up the valley sides. As secretary I could claim rightly to be the representative of the occupiers of the land (the allotment committee), and as such, we ought to be in exactly the same position as the tennant farmers who authorise me to destroy their pests on farmland, but I would not like to have to argue the toss on this with the local plod. The whole allotment committee are on at me to get the ******* shot, but I'm unclear on the legal aspect. Does anyone here shoot on an allotment site? What to others think of this position? These rabbits are going to wipe out our crops for sure unless they are destroyed. We've been baiting humane traps for weeks and only caught three.

Looks interesting that does speedy. How many shots does it hold? I like the look of it.

LOL - Yes licensing dog ownership and insisting on conditions because some fool doesn't take proper care, would be stupid, wouldn't it, but wait..... What's the difference between that stupid idea and the other one which suggests the licensing of airguns and enforcment of more controls would be a good idea? They both have exactly the same flaw - forcing controls on the mass of sane people to try to deal with the behaviour of a minority of fools.

Get a laptop with built in wireless and then you can lie about on the couch or anywhere you want and you're always connected. I'll never have another desktop at home again. It is so much easier and more convenient to use a computer that is smaller than a yellow pages, about the same weight and can do everything I want from wherever I want. If you do this you'll also need a wireless router, but the convenience of being able to move about the house and garden while still having full conection is great. Dell also have some great laptop deals, and while for the same money the computer won't be quite as fast, who cares? It'll render your internet pages in a flash. If you want games and stuff, you might have to go the desktop way, depending on what kind of graphics card you need.

Woman- As Explained by Engineers Finally - an explanation of Woman that makes sense to a man: Then there's this way of looking at things:

The term, 'turkeys looking forward to Christmas,' springs to mind. Just another step towards total abolition of gun ownership. The cops faced with rising crime strike out for total control of the respectable, in the same way a drowning man on the Titanic might have clutched at a floating walking stick. Here's the real situation regarding crime; unless the crime involves major theft or violence, don't even bother to report it because it won't be investigated unless you supply cast iron evidence of who did it. Sad but true. I have personal experience of this and the level of crime that gets ignored is ubelievable. They don't even tell you what happened half the time.

Thanks Caplock. Scope arrived nicely packed and just as you described it. Looks fine and will enjoy shooting with it I'm sure. Cheers mate.

What happens when the politicos forget the opinion of the grass-roots man and woman is that they receive a shock at the polls and others take over. For my part, I really hope that Blair and co continue to ignore the common man and woman for a bit longer so I can jump for joy when I see them kicked out. I think this may very well happen. Blair iand New Labour are so arrogant that they accept none of the criticism that is heaped upon them. Time for a change, I say.

Excellent thanks rarms I had a feeling it would.... I smell variation coming lol Seriously - if it's a smooth bore, keep it for the wall. If you want to shoot it like a rifle, get a rifle and you'll enjoy it so much more. i was SOOOO disappointed in my musket. I might as well have stood and thrown the ball down the range as far as accuracy was concerned, but the rifled musket built by parker hale was as good as any open sight rifle at a hundred yards. If I took care about casting the bullets and loading identical measures of powder it grouped fine - as fine as an open sight allowed anyhow. I wasted the money that I spent on that musket - really. It was hopeless on a range.

The FLO lady arrived at my house to do the renewal of my shotgun cert. I told her I was thinking of applying for a FAC and that I had had one twenty years ago and surrendered it due to work and family pressures at that time. She said, get the application in to me in the next few days and I'll do the two togther. She then produced a FAC application out of her bag like a magician. I filled it in, ran around and grabbed a couple of referees, took a trip to one of my permissions and gave the farmer a letter 'to whom it may concern', describing that I had permission to shoot .22 rifle and air rifle on his land for pest control, which I'd drafted. He happily signed it and I sent the lot back to the FLO lady. Nine days later I had my cert and one day later the CZ was in my hands and being sighted in on the farm.

Yes - £50. I got mine recently in nine days from posting off to the cert arriving on my mat. I was well pleased.

Good luck. If you are: - of good character - have suitable land to shoot on with written permission for the type of rifle - have adequate security arrangements - show a knowledge of the risk of thoughtless discharge of a rifle and a show a sense of responsibility You are almost bound to get a certificate.

I had a mean old hob once upon a time. If you'd put him doon yer troosers, you'd have been peeing in ten directions like a watering can ever after. Nip? he nipped me to the bone on several occasions.

Bloody right im gunner use it, Ive liked muskets ever since the first time i shot one (ten years ago) and nearly knocked me flying, filled the entire range with smoke and i couldnt see the target for ten minutes but Uh what a gun I just need to find out for certain if being antique it still needs to go on my Fac or Sg certificate cuz that means making a variation If you do want to shoot it as other than a fun shotgun, do get a rifled musket like the Enfield. It comes in three lengths and my three band would group about two inches at a hundrd yards. Our club once set up a competition between us and the TA with 7.62 slrs. We won - I kid you not. I was the second worst of the four shooters from our club and only one of the TA shooters beat me! Laugh - we nearly cried. Then when we gave them a shot of our rifles and we shot theirs, we loaded them with 80 grains of FFG powder instead of the customary practice load of 52 grains. We were shooting prone and I watched my guy get pushed back six inches by the recoil and a six foot spout of flame came out the front. He nearly S*at himself. LOL. Trying to shoot round ball out of a smooth bore musket at a target range is VERY frustrating. You'll get 24 inch groups if you are lucky at a hundred yards, wheras a good rifle will be around 2 or three inches. the main limitation is open sights, nit the rifle. It is GREAT fun I promise you, but you'll have to use it at a range. I doubt the FLO will let you play around with it on a farm. EDIT: MOST IMPRTANT POINT MIMIC - IF THIS IS A REAL ANTIQUE, FOR GOD'S SAKE DO GET IT PROOFED BEFORE YOU SHOOT IT. YOU COULD END UP MINUS FINGERS OR HALF YOUR FACE OTHERWISE IF ITS RUSTED MUCH, AND IT WILL BE. THAT BLACK POWDER EATS UP BARRELS LIKE NOWT ELSE CAN. IT PRODUCES SULPHURIC ACID IF NOT CLEANED REALLY WELL.

Oh I thought when you mentioned muzzle loading rifles you were going to use it. I'd recommend muzzle loading shooting if you like the look of antique things. They are great fun to use and VERY powerful things. I used to shoot a three band Enfield 1853 rifled musket. It was a .577 caiber with bullets weighing an ounce and a quarter (about 500 grain). Hilarious fun at a 900 fps. Trouble was, you came home with a face like a chimney sweep after an afternoon shooting it. I had an original bayonet on mine with three notches carved in it. The gun was a repro of course, and whoever mentioned the explosives licence is right of course if you wanted to use proper black powder. The thing was nearly as long as me (not quite) with a 33 inch barrel. Maybe we should have the .177 or .577 for rabbits debate... I saw one of these go the thick way through a railway sleeper. The exit hole was the size of a tea cup and the bullet had flattened out to a huge mushroom about the diameter of an egg cup. Ok for fox do you think?

No - I'd never use anything like that. My mod is a stout aluminium one, and yes, the smack from the rabbit is ten times louder than the sound of the rifle. I just get a sort of a 'ping' noise from the gun, which I think is the shockwave travelling through the barrel. The outfit is much quieter than any of the air rifles I've had, including the old TX with the same mod on it. The barrel length at 24 inches may help - not sure, but I suspect that the powder burn having stopped a full ten inches before the mod, there may be less energy in the gasses as they enter it. That's a guess, but sounds logical to me. Well heres a shock there is a parker hale fiberglass moderator thats proofed for 22lr http://www.chambersgunmakers.co.uk/Silencers.htm You wont see me rushing out to buy one but there you go.... And yep Air guns propel to the end of the barrel so theres more work for the moderator. To be honest, I don't think a 22.LR moderator would have a lot of pressure to contain. Mine has the end plate bored out to 8mm, so it has even less. It's still mouse quiet, amazing really. I think the air gun noise was largely mechanical as it was a springer, but what you say about the airgun propelling the pellet all the way MUST be true of the long barelled rimmy too. It certainly is. All I was saying was that comparing a short and a long barrelled .22LR, I wondered if the longer barrelled one would be quieter than the short because the exiting gasses would be at lower pressure, by virtue of the fact that they had already expanded more and so would have given up more energy. It's a question really - I'm trying to work out how the eley sub is SO quiet, given the nature of the moderator I'm using.

StuartP and AndyCM - thanks for the info. I'll think about it. I'm just waiting for a new more powerful scope I bought from Caplock to arrive. my old one is only a 4x32 and I felt a bit undermagnified at 65 - 75 yards. My groups are ok at about 50 - around an inch, but my airrifle is better at the same range and has a better trigger. The trigger may be the issue (as far as there is one) but I'll know better when I can be more consistent with placing the cross with a better scope. ..... We'll see in a few days maybe if the wind drops a bit.

I agree with that. Why would you want to destroy such an interesting creature unless it was creating a lot of problems. One of the cats that was run over a few years back was a Jungle Cat - bloody beautiful animal, I'd love there to be lots of them. They eat rodents, birds and amphibians across a huge swathe of central Asia and only weigh about ten to twenty pounds. To be honest though, the fact that our own native wildcat is now reduced down to a mere 2000 animals in the north of Scotland, it's not hugely likely that any introduced species would survive well alongside ourselves. Scottish Wildcat - once common all over Britain

No - I'd never use anything like that. My mod is a stout aluminium one, and yes, the smack from the rabbit is ten times louder than the sound of the rifle. I just get a sort of a 'ping' noise from the gun, which I think is the shockwave travelling through the barrel. The outfit is much quieter than any of the air rifles I've had, including the old TX with the same mod on it. The barrel length at 24 inches may help - not sure, but I suspect that the powder burn having stopped a full ten inches before the mod, there may be less energy in the gasses as they enter it. That's a guess, but sounds logical to me.

I think there are some, or were. It's pretty clear that when the DWA act was passed back in the seventies, quite a few cats were released. Maybe some of them managed to breed. There are a couple of cases of carcasses of cats being identified - one jungle cat run over by a car near Jedburugh up in the borders, and one shot cat of some kind in a gamekeeper's freezer. I'm not sure what else, but some have been authenticated. The point made about badgers is a good one as far as it goes. Big cats are much more reclusive than badgers and don't let themselves be seen even where they are in decent numbers (which they aren't in Britain). They don't live in easily identifiable sets in groups either, being solitary, reclusive and lying up in dense cover, they would be much more difficult to find. I think a lot of decent reliable types have talked about strange injury to livestock, but many sightings are probably mistakes. It's very easy to 'see things' in the half light when your brain is filling in the gaps between the information your eyes are getting and what 'might' be there a hundred yards away. In bad light, most of what we 'see' is guesswork based on our experience and what we think is likely - and that's a fact of the way our perception works. Then of course there are the hoaxers and the fantasists. So - I reckon there are a VERY few largish cats about, but that our chances of meeting one are slim. They will never be allowed to form a stable population. This is far too controlled a country for anything like that - very little is allowed to be free here nowadays - not even us two legged types, and if conker trees are being chopped down by councils because of health and safety, what chance a leopard would be left at large? http://www.britishbigcats.org/evidence.php

Certainly worth thinking about. I looked at them on the web. Is it true that you invalidate the warranty by fitting them? Is it easy to do?

I think you're right. I've had my cz about five weeks and I've topped a hundred bunnies with it. At first I could notice the trigger, now, I treat that little bit of creep as another stage and take up the slack before the final focus on the aiming point. It's very predictable and the rabbit goes down time after time after time. I love mine, and for £230 its a snip.

Already done Graham. Thanks for the advice.

That's a hell of a useful document il cacciatore.