Rabbits: The Animal Answer Guide

9 Rabbit Problems (from a human viewpoint)

159 Are rabbits pests? One of the first historical mentions of European rabbits is from the Greek geographer Strabo, who lived from about 58 BCE to 20 CE. He, at least, saw them as pests, writing, Turdetania [modern-day Andalucía province in southern Spain] also has a great abundance of cattle of all kinds, and of game. But there are scarcely any destructive animals, except the burrowing hares, by some called “peelers”; for they damage both plants and seeds by eating the roots. This pest occurs throughout almost the whole of Iberia, and extends even as far as Massilia [Marseilles, France], and infests the islands as well. The inhabitants of the Gymnesiac Islands [the Balearic Islands of Majorca, Menorca, and others in the Mediterranean off the coast of eastern Spain], it is said, once sent an embassy to Rome to ask for a new place of abode, for they were being driven out by these animals, because they could not hold out against them on account of their great numbers. Now perhaps such a remedy is needed against so great a warfare (which is not always the case, but only when there is some destructive plague like that of snakes or field-mice), but, against the moderate pest, several methods of hunting have been discovered; more than that, they make a point of breeding Libyan ferrets, which they muzzle and send into the holes. It is worth noting that rabbits were not native to the Balearic Islands but had been introduced there as early as about 1350 BCE by settlers from the Iberian Peninsula. These islands had no native mammalian predators to control rabbits either. Chapter 9 Rabbit Problems (from a human viewpoint) 160 Rabbits: The Animal Answer Guide Writing about a century later, Pliny the Elder, a Roman natural historian , tells a similar story about rabbits in the Balearic Islands. In his account, the rabbits reportedly ate so much grain that the people were starving, so the besieged residents petitioned the Roman emperor to send troops to kill the rabbits or at least cart them away. Pliny adds elsewhere that the city of Tarragona in Spain was completely destroyed by rabbits. That is very likely an exaggeration, but in the early twentieth century, a lighthouse keeper released rabbits on Washington’s San Juan Island, where 20 years later their tunnels threatened the lighthouse with collapse. More recently, archeologists in Great Britain are struggling with rabbits undermining ancient sites. The remains of Hadrian’s Wall, for instance, which was built across northern England by Romans in 122 CE to forestall the invasion of ancient Scots, is at risk. Quoted in the UK newspaper The Guardian, a Liverpool University archeologist said: “Some [sites] look like the surface of the moon. Rabbit burrows have created such a honeycomb beneath sites that sooner or later there will be a single catastrophic incident where the whole thing vanishes.” In his masterful book, Ecological Imperialism, Alfred W. Crosby writes of the first Portuguese who settled the island of Porto Santo, which lies east of North Africa near Madeira in the Atlantic, in the 1420s. They released a single female rabbit (and the young she delivered on the ship) on this previously uninhabited island, with no evidence of any earlier human presence . In the absence of any predators or diseases to which the animals were susceptible, these rabbits bred so prolifically, at a “villainous rate,” and ate so rapaciously that the settlers’ attempts to grow crops failed completely. Eventually, the settlers had to abandon the island, “defeated in their initial attempts at colonization not by primeval nature but by their own ecological ignorance.” Apart from their impact on human affairs, introduced European rabbits have wreaked ecological havoc around the world. People have introduced both domestic and wild European rabbits on some 800 islands or island groups. The reasons for these vary. In addition to those liberated to provide food for seafarers, rabbits were released for sport hunting, to raise for food or fur, as food for other animals (even as lobster pot bait), and to control vegetation. Hawaii’s Laysan Island is a notorious example, but just one of many, of the effects of ill-advised rabbit introductions. Laysan lies about 1,450 kilometers (900 miles) north of Oahu. The following is based on a review by ornithologist Storrs L. Olson. On its discovery by whalers in about 1820, it had no human inhabitants, but its bird life was spectacular. Along with 17 species of...