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.