“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.