I wouldn't call it an urban legend since there about half a dozen folks with first hand experience chiming in.
There was one grouchy guy in my community who said he would run off any punk kids with "an *rump* full of rock salt" if they cut through his property as several of the local kids would opt to get dropped off 1/4 mile from the "real" bus stop as walking the 1/4 mile would save us an hour on the bus as it made its way back around to the stop.. He was a fat mouthed blowhard that no body liked and none of the kids did anything short of walk along the drainage ditch and try not to fall in, so if he actually had shells with rock salt to shoot, no one I knew felt their sting...some one did TP his house right before a summer rain one year. Dunno who did that. No shots fired that night...im told.
I do know of a farmer who pelted tom cats who wandered in to court his barn cats. He didn't mind the free kittens as long as their were enough mice to eat, but he started running out of neighbor kids to give extra kittens to, so running off the toms was his way to control the population without killing any cats.
I know he also used it to run off dogs, like I said earlier. I appreciated him being an animal lover. Some years later, at a different property, my dog came home with a pellet gun wound in his chest and one on his back thigh. Deep ones. We took him to the vet to see if they needed to dig them out.
Turns out that when they took an xray that lucky SOB was actually shot THROUGH by a .22.
Missed every organ on the way and only chipped the tip of his vertebrae. The x ray also found a couple pieces of old bird shot logged deep in the meat of his butt. Someone wasn't using rock salt on my dog
.
That said, for less than lethal defense rock salt is preposterously stupid this day and age. Too easy to blind someone you just wanted to warn.
