I did not enjoy hiking near Camp Williams and killing rabbits. My ward (YM,scouting program)went out shooting rabbits for sport. The "Yee haw" shouted by the leader was uber creepy.
They do that when they think they are going to die. I've heard it five or six times, including a couple of times when house dogs chased a rabbit down with no intention of killing it.
I saw a Mormon guy in Utah shoot a rabbit. He wanted to shoot a coyote, but there were none around. (I imagine Mormons had killed them off). Frustrated, the Mormon guy threw the rabbit's carcass overhead and shot it midair.
There was no activity planned one Wednesday when I showed up for mutual as a deacon...the adult leader thought for a minute or two and then ordered us all to his massive Mormon van. Drove back to the trailer his family lived in. They raised rabbits. He had thought up a great activity for the evening. Each boy was meant to club a rabbit over the head and then skin it. Some of the boys cried. There weren't a lot of clean kills. There were some unhappy parents afterwards.
What the f*ck. Terrible, just terrible. My DH has PTSD from growing up in a psycho nut TBM family. One of the worse experiences-going "hunting" with his jack ass father who shot birds, bunnies, and anything moving.
Luckily my family was normal enough. I think we had a shotgun that my father had inherited from his father. Don't remember there ever being any ammo for it. It was a disturbing incident but at least I wasn't forced to go on hunting trips like your DH was.
Of course, that's what the founders had in mind when they wrote the second amendment -- that every mormon should have a god-given right to take little kids out with guns and have fun killing animals for no good reason.
Warped. Mormons aren't taught compassion or kindness; going to LDS meetings is more like a kind of pre-law class defending their prophets & church "doctrine" which travels like a a river starting high in the mountains, , over waterfalls, then through valleys out to the sea.
Last year the young single adults in a northern Cache Valley stake had a party where they dug ditches with dynamite, just for fun! No bullshit.
Nowadays shooting rabbits with a .22 is lame, You have to have an AR-15 or an SKS or you are not a real man. Extra points if you can even hit the rabbits.
While there are plenty of a-holes who shoot things just "because", I think the mormon mindset quite often devalues the sanctity of life. Think about the many RfM posts where someone is puzzled at the apparent lack of emotion at mormon funerals; this life is constantly talked about as a stepping stone to eternity, and we shouldn't be sad.
Add to that the "priesthood" feeling of superiority and "dominion" over the earth and a you get a god complex.
I'm rambling (again) but I think a connection could be made.
And according to a former seminary teacher, he and his friends would stuff the dead mutilated rabbits into peoples mailboxes. Church Scouting project or something.
I'm no great lover of rabbits as they can decimate a garden. However, I've heard of these mass rabbit shoots where the huge number of dead rabbits are just left to rot. Sounds sort of blood thirsty and wasteful. Couldn't the meat or hides be used to some good purpose?