Training Rabbits
Keepers have found it more or less possible to train rabbits to a mode of life which shall baffle the long-net poachers. By giving them regular courses of driving-in at night they will take to feeding chiefly by day, and will grow very suspicious of the sound of a footfall after dark. Where there are not enough rabbits to justify special precautions and continual watching, long-netting may be made difficult by turning cattle at night into the grass fields bordering the woods. Not only will the cattle be sure to take an inquisitive interest in the long-netting, but they will have something to say to the dogs used for driving in, and will quite upset their work. In one place some poachers were baffled after a curious fashion. A local gang had set up some seven hundred yards of new netting, worth about ten guineas, and had gone off to round up the rabbits, when another gang from a distant part of the county arrived on the scene. The curses they heaped on their luck soon gave way to blessings—at any rate, they were quick to see the chance of poaching something more valuable than rabbits. They rolled up the new nets and fled. Then the men of the first gang returned in the wake of the rabbits, which had found nothing to impede their rush to cover. Curses were deeper and stronger than those breathed before. The men decided in the end to put their case and themselves unreservedly into the hands of the police, who telephoned to the nearest railway station, and captured the poachers with their poaching brethren's gear and their own rolled up in blankets.
