You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [35]
The first hunting party took place on Christmas Day, 1859, which was apropos, since releasing those twenty-four rabbits proved to be a perpetual “gift” to the Australian ecosystem. The initial two dozen bred like mad. In 1867, The Field reported a kill near Barwon Park of over fourteen thousand rabbits, all descendants of those first two dozen. That same year, in a move that caused no end of hindsight-induced wincing, Austin was awarded a medal by the Acclimatisation Society for his successful introduction of the rabbit to Australia.
“Successful,” in this case, is a relative term. Rabbits have no natural predator in Australia, nor were there any local diseases that would claim them. Australia being an island, no such diseases were likely to be introduced. Meanwhile, they ate any greenery they could sink their teeth into, often at the expense of the native sheep, cattle, and other livestock. They bred like, well, rabbits, and soon Australia was covered in a gray, furry carpet.
Austin was not the only one not to think through the consequences. In 1854, Albrecht Feez of New England, New South Wales, turned out rabbits he had with him because no one would buy them. By 1865, he had been advised never to appear in New England again, as his rabbits had multiplied such that they were destroying the best land in the area.
The spread of the rabbits was as much due to lethargy as anything. The traditional methods of restraining livestock, wire fencing or stone walls, proved woefully ineffective; the rabbits would simply climb the fence or dig underneath. The only effective means — for example, six-foot-high walls and trenches lined with broken glass and sharp metal — were prohibitively expensive.
Many locals welcomed the rabbits at first. In 1866, landowners begged the government to legislate to protect the rabbits, as they were being attacked by those who disliked having their crops eaten by rampaging hordes of bunnies. By 1872, those same landowners were begging even more fervently for legislation to make the destruction of rabbits compulsory.
By the turn of the century, extraordinary measures were required. In 1907, the Western Australian No. 1 Rabbit Proof Fence was completed. It stretched over eleven hundred miles — a distance twice the length of Great Britain — from Starvation Boat Harbor on the south coast to a point near Cape Keraudren on the northwest coast. Guarded by riders on camels, the fence was constructed in an attempt to prevent the rabbits from literally eating their way across Australia. Unfortunately, such a massive fence proved impossible to maintain, and it proved ultimately ineffective.
Every attempt was made to control the rabbit plague — for they were now considered such — whether by gun, trap, poison, or attack by ferret, but nothing worked for long or in any practically useful numbers. The government offered a reward of twenty-five thousand pounds to anyone who could come up with a solution. Sadly, this mostly brought out the greedy fanatics. In the 1890S, a gentleman named W. Rodier had tried an odd sort of eugenics program in which he would kill only does, leaving the bucks alive, on the theory that the smaller supply of females would force the males to gang up on them and make them less likely to reproduce. Years of failure for this to in any way change things did not deter Rodier, who fervently believed in his disastrous system until he died in the 1930S. Adrian Loir, the nephew of the famous Dr. Louis Pasteur, suggested spreading a chicken cholera among the rabbits; chicken farmers pointed out the obvious danger to their chickens in such