CHAPTER X
RABBITS AND DINGOES
SIR HARRY LAUDER tells a story of a Scotchman visiting a farm in the Australian back blocks. Said he to the farmer:
“I notice that you’re Scotch.”
“Yes,” replied the farmer, “and my wife, too.”
“I dare say,” said the visitor, “there are many Scotch people in these parts.”
“Yes,” was the answer, “we have quite a lot of Scotch folk, but that isn’t our real trouble—it’s rabbits!”
When the Australian stockman has a nightmare, he dreams of a rabbit, the pest of the Commonwealth and the terror of the pastures. There are tens of millions of rabbits all over the country, and but for the constant warfare against them they would eat up all the grass of Australia. Hundreds of stations have been ruined by them, and the larger places employ men to do nothing else but destroy them. Some of the rabbiters kill an average of four hundred rabbits a day. Yet those that survive cost Australia countless millions of dollars, and the end of the plague is not yet in sight.
Enormous rewards have been offered for a method of exterminating the pests. The government of New South Wales once promised one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars to any one who would suggest or invent a means for their extermination throughout the state. The reward was never claimed, and the rabbits breed and breed and never stop breeding. A pair will produce six litters a year, and each litter will average five rabbits. As soon as the bunnies are six months old they begin to breed, and in five years a single pair will increase to ten million pairs. One can gain some idea of what this means from the fact that every family of seven rabbits will eat as much as one sheep.
The man who first brought rabbits to Australia was a squatter near Melbourne who wanted something to remind him of home. Besides, he thought hunting wallabies, kangaroos, and wombats was poor fun in comparison with the good old English sport of “chasing the hare.” He soon found, however, that hunting rabbits was a serious business. They multiplied so rapidly that his station was overrun. His pasture disappeared, and do what he could, they increased by thousands. They eventually cost him more than two hundred thousand dollars in loss of stock, in addition to the money he spent in his attempts at their destruction.
Among the best methods of controlling the pest are poisoning, fencing, and the paying of bounties. In poisoning, coarse bran saturated with phosphorus is sometimes sown in furrows, and so covered that stock will not get it, though the rabbits will burrow for it. The great drawback of this method is that it also kills numbers of insect-destroying birds.
Another system works well in dry seasons and in areas where water is scarce. Tanks, water holes, and dams are surrounded with wire netting, and troughs of poisoned water are placed outside. Often the trough, too, is enclosed in wire with a hole in it just big enough to let in a rabbit. In this way, the bodies of the poisoned rabbits can be collected, skinned, and burned. It is dangerous to leave the dead animals to dry up in the sun where stock grazes, for when grass is scarce the cattle will eat the carcasses for the sake of the salt in them. This method, too, exterminates numbers of insect-eating birds, so it has its disadvantages, though it does kill thousands of rabbits. I have heard that in one of the drought years, when the rabbits were more numerous than they are now, three million were poisoned at a single water hole.
But fencing and bounties have proved still more effective than poisoning. The local boards in infested districts pay millions of dollars for rabbits killed, and states and individuals spend millions on fences. According to the definition in the South Australian law the “rabbit-proof” fence must be of wire netting three feet high, set four inches into the ground, and topped by one strand of barbed wire. A “vermin fence,” which is put up to keep out “rabbits, wild dogs, and foxes,” is built like the rabbit-proof fence, except that it is four and one half feet high and has three strands of barbed wire at the top. These fences form a network over the land and make the stone-walled fields of New England look like mere chicken runs in comparison.
They are even built across the roads, so that travelling along the highways is often a dreary business of opening and closing gates in the rabbit fences. In some sections where there are gates about every five miles, the men passengers on mail coaches usually arrange “gate watches” between them. There is a heavy penalty for leaving one open.
The extent of the fences is amazing. One built by the government of New South Wales along the South Australian boundary is three hundred and fifty miles long. Southern Queensland has one six hundred and twelve miles long. The state of South Australia has more than enough to make a girdle round the earth, and New South Wales has spent more than thirty millions of dollars in building her one hundred thousand miles of rabbit fence.
As a result of these various measures, in the more closely settled areas the rabbit pest is pretty well under control and is now at its worst only in lands so poor that it is unprofitable to fence them.
Moreover, the rabbit has in recent years been made to pay something for his keep. Frozen rabbits are shipped to the markets of Europe to the number of twenty millions a year, and along Australian country roads one may see thousands of rabbit carcasses hung on fences awaiting wagons to take them to the packing houses for freezing. Rabbit skins worth some eighteen million dollars are annually exported for making felt hats, coat linings, and women’s furs.
In the early nineties, when the news of the discoveries of the great German bacteriologist, Doctor Koch, was being flashed about the world, Australia hoped that some bacillus might be found that would rid her of her rabbits. It was claimed that an assistant of Pasteur had found a culture which would spread an infectious and deadly disease among rabbits, but from which other animals would be immune. Pasteur was invited out to Australia to try out this specific, but, as he was too old to undertake the voyage, he sent a representative. A small island stocked with every kind of animal on the continent was handed over to this scientist but he failed to satisfy the authorities that his system of inoculation could be carried out without danger to other animals, and so the wonder-working bacillus is still to be discovered.
The states have had no better luck in introducing other animals to prey upon the rabbits. Some years ago West Australia turned two hundred cats into one of the rabbit districts, thinking they would exterminate the vermin. When the government inspectors went around a year later to check up results they found that the cats were living in the rabbits’ burrows on the friendliest terms with their long-eared landlords.
Foxes were brought in with the same object as well as for sport. But now that Reynard takes annual toll of about one hundred thousand sheep the foxes are shot, trapped, poisoned, and fenced against. In some places they are more dreaded then the wild dogs, or dingoes.
When the Australian aborigines were first seen by the white settlers from England, they had with them many dogs, which they had trained to hunt. Some people claim that these dogs are native to Australia, some that they were brought in by Malay invaders from the north, and some that they are the descendants of a number of sick dogs left by a Dutch vessel on the shores of Australia in 1622. If the last theory is true, the climate must have agreed with the dogs, for they have multiplied and spread all over the country. To this day the southwest corner of Queensland and the northwest corner of New South Wales are badly infested with them. In a recent year dingoes and foxes were responsible for the loss of one hundred and forty thousand sheep in New South Wales alone. Strangely enough, the dingoes generally eat only the tongues of the sheep they kill.
The “dogger” employed by the station manager to get rid of the dingoes is usually the station rabbiter as well. As he makes his rounds to lay baits of phosphorized grain for the rabbits, he drags along at the tail of his cart a bit of mutton or other fresh meat. At intervals of a mile or so he leaves some meat with strychnine well rubbed into it. The wild dog will follow the trail to the bait, gulp down the meat, and shortly thereafter fall dead in convulsions.
Each sheep station is represented on the nearest local county board, generally by the store-keeper. When the “dogger” presents the scalp and the tail of a dingo, joined by a strip of skin cut along the back, the storekeeper credits him with the sum of one dollar and eighty-seven cents. Three times a year vouchers are turned in to the secretary of the board and the employee receives his check. As a rule the station owner adds enough to make up the amount paid for each dingo scalp to five dollars, so that, whether he is a regular station employee or an independent worker, the Australian “dogger” makes a good living.