Hunters are being paid a 20p bounty for each rabbit killed on Shetland.
The move comes after crofters and farmers reported severe damage to crops, particularly during the Easter breeding season.
The South Mainland Rabbit Control Society said shooting was the more humane way of cutting the numbers.
But Doreen Graham, of the Scottish SPCA told BBC Scotland: "Shooting is probably the best option, providing the person is a good shot."
"The Scottish SPCA likes to see agriculture in a strong financial state because animal welfare suffers if it's not."
Six rabbits can eat as much as a sheep in one day
Drew Ratter Crofters Commission
A spokesperson for the South Mainland Rabbit Control Society said: "Anybody in the south mainland can join. The larger landowners have already signed up and anybody wanting to hunt should get their permission.
"The society counts the tails and the money is paid out once a month. We keep a tally of each person's tails and a record of where they were shot.
"We've got six or seven hunters at the moment. They do it for sport and pocket money."
Drew Ratter, of the Crofters Commission for Shetland and Orkney, said: "Six rabbits can eat as much as a sheep in one day.
"When you multiply that by thousands it is a considerable amount of food being consumed.
Thousands of rabbits died in the previous culls
"Shetland has had good summers recently and the rabbit population has multiplied tremendously fast."
Mr Ratter, who is also a Shetland Islands councillor, added: "The damage they can cause is huge, especially in an area like the south end of the island which is sandy. Rabbits can destroy huge areas of grazing."
A bounty has previously been operated on the island by the local authority.
Shetland Islands Council paid 25p per tail in 1990, and a total of 11,183 rabbits were killed.
The following year the bounty rose to 35p per tail, and the number shot rose to 15,607.
If this is necassary then to use them to feed the homeless MUST be an alternative to tossing or burning this animal. Anything else isn't justified in my opinion.
Susan
There was a period when I was growing up in northern Ms. that Cottontail rabbits propagated themselves out of control. We normally hunted them anyway, killing for sport and we ate what we killed. (If you eat meat, you have no moral standing to criticize me for doing so.) During the culminating year of the population explosion they were everywhere. You could literally walk into a field and see them sitting in clumps of debris here and there. One would jump up every few feet. It turns out we didn't have to do anything extraordinary to cull the population, though. A devastating disease hit them that winter and about ninety-five percent of them died. That was in the 1950's. To this day they have not returned in any appreciable numbers. I think that if they had been heavily hunted by either human or other predators they may have escaped the fate of living so close to each other that they easily passed disease and therefore endangered their species. We might think of that when we look at our own policies of crowding our living conditions and consider pathogens like bird flu.
Leland
This is horrible. We're supposed to protect animals, not kill them. We should introduce bunny birth contol, if we want to keep the population down, or plant more crops.
Reviewed by Jerry Bolton (Reader)
Reviewed on April 10, 2006
Ferchristsakes, kill the damn things, make a huge stew and feed the homeless. I love animals, but we have go much too far in our warped way of thinking. In America I saw a PETA spokesman say that animal had as much right as humans did. Horse feathers!
Truly sick, and truly not surprising at all in this totally perverse 'modern' world we now live in, Peter. Wolves and other animal predators naturally kept rabbit populations 'in balance.' They did it for countless centuries.
So our first thought as a 'modern society' was to put a bounty on killing wolves. We've now killed off most of the wolves around the entire globe. We are such intelligent beings. So now, we put bounties on killing rabbits - because now, they have no predators - except man.
Six rabbits can eat as much as a sheep in one day 
Susan
Birgit and Roger
Leland
So our first thought as a 'modern society' was to put a bounty on killing wolves. We've now killed off most of the wolves around the entire globe. We are such intelligent beings. So now, we put bounties on killing rabbits - because now, they have no predators - except man.