First published in Column Eight on the 28th October, 1992
Earlier this month the Sunday Times printed a full-page advertisement requesting people to sign one of those typical Government-petitioning forms. Your signature agreed that the Government was holding back the possibility of a major industry in the export of rabbit meat and fur.
Apparently a large number of people signed the form and sent
it in.
Since MPs either don’t hear what the people are saying, or don’t
want to, it naturally followed a few days later that Mr Falloon beetled on about
it being utter nonsense that rabbits could constitute any sort of industry. The
large number of people who signed the form must be wrong.
I often have the disheartening feeling that we have reached
a curious stage in our democracy where only those elected to government are
ever right about anything. Those who disagree, or who have to live with the consequences
of Government policies, are not considered worth paying attention to. (Even
when there’s a referendum.)
Back to rabbits. When it comes to rabbit control politicians
think ‘myxomatosis.’ (Personally, I always think myxomatosis sounds like a
medical name for athlete’s foot.) The politician’s attitude is paradoxical;
after all, is myxomatosis ecologically sound? It certainly isn’t a pleasant (or
quick) method of exterminating the rabbit. Slow and painful by degrees is the
myxomatosis approach.
Once Mr Falloon had had his say, Warren Cooper got in on
the act. Mr Cooper, who is known for his wisdom in all things related to the
land, piped up and said that historically there was no sound economic precedent
for exporting rabbits.
I don’t claim to be a great historian. I can only remember
that the French Revolution began in 1789 because three of the numbers run in
order, and the other one must be less than 2.
What I know about the topic of rabbit history I first
gleaned from the New Zealand Encyclopaedia lying on my shelf. I guess
this heavyweight tome is available to Mr Cooper – by law all books in New
Zealand have to be.
That two and a half kilo muscle-builder states that as early
as 1894 more than 17 million rabbit skins were exported from this country. That
sound like a sound economic precedent to me.
In case the encyclopaedia isn’t enough, here’s another bit
of history: in the Shag
Valley, in 1883, 85,000 rabbits were taken, and contrary to current practice,
every effort was made to get some financial return for the labour of trapping
and poisoning. By 1896 a factory at Dunback was putting through a
quarter of a million rabbits annually (and only 10,000 sheep). And keeping men
in work.
This exporting so expanded that up until the 1940s there was
a significant trade in frozen and canned rabbit meat. Isn’t that a major
industry?
Perhaps the sheep industry wasn’t doing so well as a result
of the rabbits. The two don’t mix (which is probably where mixomatosis comes
in) – at least not when they’re trying to share the same land. I know as much
about export as I know about history, but with sheep exports in the state they
are, I sometimes wonder if we’re focusing on the wrong animal.
Equation? Excess-rabbit problems in NZ. Europeans want
rabbits. Answer? Give them rabbits. To those of us untrained in bureaucracy,
answers sometimes seem too simple.
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| Unfortunately I don't know the name of the artist in this case. |
I was slightly off the mark in regard to all NZ books
having to be available to Parliamentarians as this
article shows. All NZ books have to be made available to the National
Library of NZ. Only some of those books are then available to Parliament,
depending on the subject matter.
In spite of what those long-gone MPs thought, the facts
about rabbit export are all true, and can be verified online. The rabbit plague
hasn’t gone away. In the small town of Moeraki, and 35 minutes south of where
we now live, the rabbits were visibly in charge, not in farmland but in the
back yards of people’s houses.
