In the early years of the Great Depression, jackrabbits became a plague in western Kansas. With no wheat to hold the soil and no coyotes left because of the bounty, rabbits bred by the thousands. They ate what little wheat came up. They ate garden rows in a night.
So the counties organized rabbit drives. A notice was nailed to the post office door. On a Sunday, every man and boy in the township was expected to come. They formed a line a mile wide, walking slowly across the prairie, beating sticks on tin pans. They drove the rabbits toward a pen made of chicken wire at the edge of town.
When the pen was full, and it would be full with hundreds of rabbits moving over each other, the men would club them. This was not sport. This was pest control and food at the same time. Afterward, the women came with washtubs. They skinned and cleaned the rabbits right there in the field. Meat that could not be eaten that week was canned in glass jars with salt.
One drive in Finney County in 1933 killed twenty-eight thousand rabbits in one afternoon. The children who were there remembered not the killing, but the fact that for the first time in months, everyone in town had meat. A ten-year-old boy who had been on the line wrote years later that his mother made rabbit stew that night and he ate three bowls, and his father did not tell him to stop

Hard to beat a nice snowshoe hare stewed up with patats and carrots

My grandfathers recipe also has some dumplings.Excellent.

Rabbit is very good eating. That's is crazy there was that many rabbits in that area. We used have a few jack rabbits in this area but haven't see any for a few years.

I only tried jack rabbit once and didn't care for it at all.

… ai pic … and them jack’s would’ve cut and run right up between their legs

I have to admit, they look pretty docile for watching the one next to it get bonked with a frying pan and it's sibling being skinned on the other side of the fence.

… I’m likely wrong

….the whole thing’s probably legit

We had himalayan rabbit for supper. I found himalayin in the road behind the house.

Here's a real picture of the jackrabbit round-up.



Keith

You have issues! "It puts the lotion on it's skin or else it gets the hose again"..................

When I was a kid we had grass hay that dad put up in a stackyard at the base of a hill. One winter the blacktail jack rabbit population was high and the snow got deep. Those rabbits had trails beat in to the stack and were eating so much hay it was caving off the sides. We started laying on the stack and shooting them with .22's as they came. I don't know how many we killed but it was hundreds.

Also, every winter we had a FFA rabbit hunt in Johns Valley. It was a long narrow open sage brush draw. We would line up across the draw and walk a couple miles shooting hundreds of rabbits as we went with shotguns. Good times.