I was working in an National Recreation Area campground many years ago when I heard a huge ruckus up the hill in the clover - the field was the area over the campground septic tanks so it was only grass and clover, and there was a baby bunny giving off a high-pitched squeal as a baby weasel was trying to grab it and they were rolling around as the mother bunny was thumping and grunting nearby, wanting to chase off the weasel. Being a tall human being looking down at this noisy tableau, I felt like a giant bending over and picking up the baby bunny as the weasel dropped off and ran into the clover. Mom still thumping a few more steps, and the baby making a gawdawful racket in my hand, and I'm thinking people are going to look up here and wonder what on earth I'm doing.

Then the baby stopped squalling, I guess figuring I was too big to defend itself against, and the mom stopped. I looked at the baby and found no serious injuries, just a little weasel slobber, so I put baby down next to mom and shooed them off away from the weasel's direction of travel.

Some days later some children came over to my ranger booth with a bloodied broken-necked baby rabbit, telling me they'd rescued it from a weasel and could I help it. I carried the baby and as we walked back to the campsite and I told them about the earlier event, and said that the difference was that this bunny couldn't survive it's injuries, and that the nature of the campground was such that there were lots of bunnies so they'd survive despite the weasels that ate them, and the weasels are as important as the rabbits. By the time we got back to the site the children (age 10 and under) understood that I had to give the baby bunny back to the weasel and it could feed it's babies. The parents were harder to convince than the children. If no one had been around I'd have dispatched the baby, but I wasn't going to be forever in those children's minds as the ranger who killed baby bunnies.