Question about farm guns?

Lazy Farmer said:

Hello, I will share what we are doing as far as farm firearms.
These are not recommendations. It is what we are doing, that's it.
Find what works for your application. These are pointers. not advice.

For the rodents and snakes, we carry a tiny double action 22lr revolver loaded with varmint shot, not bullets, when working on the farm. Living in Florida, snakes and rats are a constant encounter. They are in your face in an instant and there is no time to go get a gun and come back.. they will be gone.​

For coons, opossums & foxes we trap, we use a Marlin rifle chambered in 22lr. So we don't damage the traps.

Slaughtering hogs or dispatching a lame or downed goat, we we use a 9X19 9mm handgun. Also for EDC.

For coyotes, feral trespassing dogs, we either use a Winchester 3030 or Armalite ar chambered in 223.

Safety always-
ALWAYS know what is "ALSO" in the direction you are pointing.
The larger the caliber, the further it goes.
Never walk around with your finger on the trigger. Never touch the trigger until the last second, when you are ready to expire what it is pointed at.
Most important of all. Train with it. Especially if you are not a gun person. You need to be familiar with the weapon before you need to use it in a critical situation.

Be careful please to all firearm newbies. A lot of responsibility and maturity is required when owning and storing firearms.

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nao57 said:

So to be fair, at the first I want to tell you I don't really like guns. I've never liked them. I understand why people have them. I'd hoped to not to have one. But you can't control when you have predators on your farm.

I was curious to ask if its possible to reasonably use pistols instead of rifles on a farm to get rid of predators? Can you do most things with a cheap pistol instead of a rifle against predators if you don't have bears to deal with?

It looks like rifles cost more. That's why I thought to ask this. I still hope I never have to use it.

Also, mostly it looks like people had rifles for back in the day when they had deer and bears to worry about. I don't see myself fighting off any bears any time soon. Mountain lions are here and in many states, but for those I'm not sure they'd actually go to where people are. And I don't hunt deer either. So it seems like if you had coyote problems, would pistols work for that? The most common predator in the southwest now is coyotes. My state showed in its records that last year over 2,000 coyotes had been 'self defensed' away from farms, etc. But the number for bears trapped or, dispatched was like 40 something, 43 I think(?) (Interesting how the numbers work on that.)

And people in rural areas people sometimes do shoot coyotes from their porches to keep them away from their animals. When I was growing up one of my friends, this happened to them every summer.

...

Also, here's an interesting thought for you. My state listed that it had about 100 bears in it at any given time. That number changes a little bit over the years but not much. I'm not sure what other states reports would look like. But for my state, I'd seen several reports, 1 this year, and at least 1 other year where the number trapped or killed was typically in the 40s also. Now the average bear lives an average of 10 to 20 years. Many can live beyond 30 years. So this idea that bears can be friendly seems kind of silly, because if you look at the numbers, in just 1 year its almost 45% chance that any given bear goes after people or goes to an area with people in it for 'food'. And if you factor in how long they live, that looks like pretty hard odds to beat that they wouldn't go after people ever, their entire life time when its 45% chance per year...

...

Also, the biggest farm predator is actually dogs. That's what the stats say, dogs. When economically things go south, then people don't want to harm their dog if they can't feed it so they used to take it to the edge of town and let it go. When I was a small kid, my family remembers 1 year (winter) that in the county over 300 sheep were killed by stray dogs that were running in a pack because they'd been dumped and then they all just kind of ended up together.

I also hoped by putting these kinds of thoughts together that people could also see guns aren't meant for mischief, and should be used only for the least amount of harm possible.

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