Why have rabbits remained as scarce as they presently are for so long?
COUNTRY FILE
IT was only upon driving through The Neale and seeing a pair of young rabbits skip to safety from the side of the road that I realised how much we are missing this quintessential part of the Irish countryside.
Twenty years ago, post myxomatosis, rabbit numbers were swelling, even though local populations appeared to ebb and flow month on month. Then it was that the even more hideous scourge of viral hemorrhagic disease arrived on the scene, and our poor old bunnies took the hit yet again.
Nobody can question the fact that rabbits can be something of a plague. Not only can they eat their way through extensive areas of crops planted for the table, they are also capable of inflicting considerable damage to fields and hedgerows with their extensive burrowing.
Traditionally, foxes and other predators will eat their way through huge numbers of rabbits. Yet there is one thing these endearing little animals do better than almost any other mammal, and that is multiply their numbers. There seems little prospect of that at present, for a combination of factors is keeping them well in check.
The north American mink remains abundant, despite the concerted efforts of some to keep these invasive and ferocious creatures in check. Where a mink discovers a colony of rabbits, it will explore each and every burrow, slaughtering all that it meets along the way. While most other predators will occasionally engage in some kind of killing spree, they are mostly content to kill what they need in order to survive. The mink is not like that. It will kill, kill, and kill again, for nothing more than the self-indulgent glory of doing so. In and out of every rabbit burrow it will go, leaving in its wake as many victims as meet its savage jaws.
That said, the rabbit is also a stranger to this shore, having been brought here by the Anglo-Normans near a thousand years ago. They brought them as a source of food – and in a land where food shortage was a common occurrence, what a welcome provision they must have been!
I find myself reminded of time spent living destitute in a caravan in the middle of nowhere in the midst of one bitterly cold Scottish winter. The caravan had no form of heating and was fitted with one bare electric light which swung from the ceiling in the frigid gale admitted by ill-fitting windows, a kettle and a television.
The only food available was rabbit meat, and the only rabbits I could catch were afflicted with myxomatosis. On top of that I had to boil them up in the kettle.
This unfortunate situation persisted only half a week before a Good Samaritan presented me with a lifeline in the form of a train ticket south to civilisation.
Mind you, rabbit alone is not good food. When settlers in Australia found themselves surrounded by what must have seemed an abundance of free meat and tucked into swarms of rabbits heartily, they soon found themselves suffering from what came to be called ‘rabbit starvation’, due to the inability of the human digestive system to process meat with no fat.
However, put a rabbit in a pie with a cheap cut of beef or lamb and you start to appreciate the finer qualities of everyone’s favourite pet.
But I must ask why rabbits have remained as scarce as they presently are for so very long.