MODERN “WIDOW’S CRUSE"

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVII, 19 November 1927, Page 12

MODERN “WIDOW’S CRUSE"

70 MILLION RABBITS DESTROYED.

BUT NUMBERS STILL UNDIMINISHED.

In Sydney there were sold at auction in the course of one recent month. 800 tons of rabbit skips, representing the destruction of some 10,000,000 rabbits; and the bag for the yholq of this year, in the judgment of experts, mav easily amount to 70,000,000. And yet, it is declared there is no evidence of any decline in the agricultural ravages of the rabbit, the most undesirable immigrant that ever landed in Australia. lit is now some eighty years since tlie original couple, taken from England, were liberated on Australian soil in the reasonable, but not soo confident hope, that their progeny would supply the colonists with an acceptable change of diet and additional possibilities of roqgh shooting. Rabbits, unfortunately, have multiplied in Australia until, in the absence of all their natural enemies, with the important exception of man, they have become one of the most destructive and indestructible pests that over cursed a farming population.

Hie vast public rewards offered to the inventor of a remedy for the evil are still unearned. It is little consolation that a dead Australian rabbit, unlike a dead tsetse fly, may be worth half-a-crown for the skin that, under another name, is said io supply so much of the American demand for furs.

'lhe rabbit, in his hundreds of millions, remains substantially an un abated scourge in Australia, the the world's most telling object lesson against tampering with the balance oi nature.