Hey, Y'all! Watch This!
Mike Williamson pointed me at this article, which describes hunting Wisconsin whitetail deer with a 12 pound Mountain Howitzer cannon.
I've gone cannoning before (a friend of mine made a 72mm black-powder cannon, and we fired frozen-juice canisters filled with cement out of it on more than one occasion), but I've never undertaken to HUNT with one. This fella has.
Well, I dug around on his site a little bit, and found another choice article: if deer hunting isn't your speed, how about feral cat hunting -- this time with a coehorn mortar?
Besides being good for a laugh, both of these articles are full of very practical information. And if you've got the money lying around, this guy will be happy to sell you plans for building your own large-bore black-powder replicas. (Note: "replica" in this case means "fully functional replica of a 19th-century weapon")
This is a guy I'd love to have as a drinking buddy... though perhaps not as a next-door neighbor. Unless we've got really, really big yards.
NOTE: Apparently when I said "good for a laugh," some of you reached the erroneous (though understandable) conclusion that I find killing "funny." The parts I find funny in the article above are not the photos of dead animals. They're in the presentation of some of the other material. Since some of you are going to continue to take offense at this anyway, I'd like to point out that I write a comic strip in which violence (including killing) is presented in such a way that it is funny. This is difficult to do, but if you're reading this, that's because you read the comic, and (it may be assumed) you laugh. Why do you laugh?