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"I hope someone gets after you in response to this bloody column," wrote a lady from upstate New York, whose correspondence is generally friendly. "Your sadistic streak was dripping like ... oh, go ahead; I'll give you the pleasure of some blood-thirsty analogy."

She was referring, of course, to last week's column on rabbits and how to kill 'em, cook 'em and eat 'em. It was based on a piece of culinary writing in The New York Times.

I suppose the part that offended her most was the description of the backwoods method of killing a trapped rabbit: bashing its head against the nearest tree.

"Good God, Gene," wrote a New York City reader, a retired journalist who grew up a few miles from where I spent my youth. "And I thought I got a real knock upside the head from my quick look at the NYT's rabbit-killin' story, displayed next to a pic of the cutest bunny I've seen since Easter 1938." Now, he said, he would have to send the Times writer a copy of my column "so she can see what tough folks I used to live among."

While this friendly fire from Up North was ringing in my conscience, the voice of the South sounded warm praise of rabbit as a delectable treat at mealtime. And there seemed to be an acceptance of the fact that to eat the rabbit, you first have to kill it, and that requires an act of violence.

"My friend, your article ... made this old boy laugh," wrote Rick Barton of Greensboro, "and in these trying times a good laugh is sometimes hard to come by."

Wrote Richard Peeples of McLeansville: "When I was 12 years old, I did a lot of rabbit hunting with our dogs and my trusted shotgun. I had no trouble in shooting rabbits. They were plentiful in those days. I also built what we Southern boys called a 'rabbit gum.' I would use apples as bait and would rub an apple on the door so as to attract the rabbit. ... Now the problem was, if the trap was tripped I would pull the rabbit out, but I could never kill it. I would take the rabbit home and my father would do the deed. A quick stroke behind the neck with the side of the hand and it was over. Thus, the term 'rabbit punch.'"

The column brought back memories of Dad to an editor in Fairhope, Ala. Her father was an avid hunter, frequently enriching his table with the products of his hunt.

"He was always so proud whenever the menu featured something he personally had provided," she said. "Whether it swam, hopped or flew, he literally preened at the table."

As my Southern-raised New York friend acknowledged, we Southerners spring from tough stock. Our recent ancestors couldn't pick their meats off the freezer shelves at Publix or Winn-Dixie. If they wanted meat, they had to go out and shoot it or catch it.

If their methods weren't always gentle, we must remember that life for them wasn't gentle. Our ancestors from the 19th and early 20th centuries knew pain as a part of daily life. They couldn't run to Walgreen's for aspirin to ease their headaches or toothaches.

So to them, a rabbit's momentary pain at the moment of execution did not weigh heavily on the conscience. The animal was necessary to fend off hunger at home. And before it could become food, it had to be killed. For the rabbit, dying at the hands of a human was probably preferable to dying at the teeth and claws of a four-legged predator. Foxes, wolves, bobcats, lynxes and weasels do not dispatch their prey with quick blows to the neck or skull.

Those who shudder at the backwoodsman's methods might ask themselves what happens to the steers, hogs, lambs and chickens they eat before these animals make it from the feed lot to the meat counter. Some folks would demand that food animals be put to sleep by lethal injection, but only after a rigorous due process, including extensive rights to appeal. It doesn't work that way.

I don't hunt rabbits, or anything else, for sport, but if the bunny stood between my family and starvation, I would buy a shotgun and go hunting. I would prefer that to administering a fatal blow to a helpless rabbit, though I'm not sure the rabbit would.

One note of caution about eating a shotgun-killed rabbit, contributed by my friend the editor from Fairhope: "I was at the supper table eating the fried rabbit -- and rather enjoying it -- until I took a bite and hit something hard. When I pulled that bit out of my mouth, I discovered it was a piece of buckshot my mother failed to find during its preparation, and attached to it was a tuft of fur."

For those who want to find a merciful way of putting down the bunny before cooking it, Pamela Alley of the Rabbit Industry Council recommends a video, "Humane Rabbit Slaughter for Home Use."

"It teaches how to end up with clean, healthful food from this animal that has been lovingly raised and honorably killed," she wrote me. The RIC's address is 3789 Oro Bangor Highway, Oroville, CA 95966.

Enjoy your rabbit.

Write to Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson SC 29625. E-mail: Swampscum2@aol.com