In addition to what was probably the most memorable shot as noted in my post #6 above, there was another one that I clearly remember, I’ve thought about countless times over the years, and that actually triggered a major change in my outlook on hunting and shooting, and perhaps even life as related to animals.
I used to hunt quite a bit from the time I was a kid with a BB gun up until I was in my Junior or Senior year in college. I also used to go out shooting, not exactly hunting but I suppose you could call it that, but I was shooting for sport, basically using animals for target practice fun and to improve my shooting skills. Among these were doves, blackbirds, field larks (similar to quail but nobody eats them that I know of), and especially ground hogs during the spring and early summer. One of my objectives for groundhog hunting was to prevent them from eating up my family’s and other local farmers’ soy beans, but the main reason for me was to see how far out I could kill them. When I reflected on it later, I realized it was a sport for me. I hunted the groundhogs with a Remington 700 Varmint Special .22-250, my own handloads, and a fixed 24x Japan Tasco. I mostly drove around a 10-mile radius of home looking for shots in the 250+ yard range. There weren’t all that many groundhogs around, to the point that I would sometimes drive around for an hour or more and not get a shot. I sometimes would not even take a particular shot if it were much closer than about 150 yards, preferring to wait until some other day when might catch the animal out at a further distance where it would be more challenging.
That brings me to the memorable and life-changing part. One day, I was on my Aunt and Uncle’s place, and there was a groundhog about 175-200 yards away, out in the field about 20 or 30 feet from the ditch bank amongst the 6” tall soy beans that I’m sure were nice and tasty to the groundhogs. I set up, aimed and fired, and the groundhog ran back to the ditch bank and disappeared. What the heck? I knew I’d made a good shot, I knew the gun was sighted in the way it’d been for a couple of years or more, so the groundhog should have dropped in his tracks when hit squarely with a .22-250. I walked down the rows to where he’d been, wondering if something had gone off about the gun, the scope, a defective bullet, or what. When I got there, I found that the poor animal had strewn his intestines between the spot where he was hit and his burrowed home in the ditch bank. He was trying to live and get to safety, and made it back into his hole, no doubt to die minutes later. A feeling of remorse and sadness came over me, I loaded up my gear and went home.
The fact hit me that I was killing these animals for sport, but they were dying in earnest. I suddenly felt selfish, or something of that nature, and I never shot another groundhog after that one. I still loved shooting and still did just as much, but thereafter I did mostly target shooting. I pretty much stopped killing anything for sport after that day, with only a few exceptions from time to time for nuisance animals such as blackbirds (which swarmed in the hundreds of thousands or millions in the wintertime, and sometimes spread disease to livestock -- according to the USDA -- as they traveled from farm to farm, and also provided endless wing-shooting opportunities), a few vultures that got to pecking the eyes out of newborn calves on a local farm, dove shoots when I knew that someone was going to clean and eat them, or clearing turtles out of farm ponds to stop them from decimating the fish population, etc. Otherwise, I pretty much don’t shoot animals for sport – only if someone is going to eat them. Oh... and snakes. As my grandmother said regarding snakes, "
If I see him and I can get to him, he's gonna go." 
