When I was a kid my father and I used to walk around the paddocks with a spotlight, looking for these varmints near our lambing ewes. One night we found a fox that had taken one of twins. It stood near the mother and the other lamb, eating its kill. Every now and again the other lamb would come close and the fox would make a half-hearted lunge at it.

Dad sent me around the light beam to shoot it with our farmer's gun - a bolt-action Mossberg. On the still, frosty air, I could hear crunching on the bones long before I got up there. At maybe 15 yards I stopped and squeezed off with a rifled slug I'd loaded without telling Dad. Hit in the spine, that fox was blown over more emphatically than anything I'd seen then or have since.

But Dad was not pleased. 'What if he'd run? You might have missed!' Yeah, I thought, but we didn't need the dog to find this one.

So what is the point in context of this thread? Well, that fox still had dinner in its mouth, too.