Haha! Excellent.
Many parallels here, including the rifles - my third rifle as a teenager was a Mercury and my fourth a FWB127.
From one of my shoots a few years later, a horse paddock permission where the bunnies weren't one bit gun shy, I used to attain some huge bags. So when we had bunny meat aplenty and the freezer was full I used to sell the excess ones for a quid apiece.