Rabbits

First published in Column Eight on the 28^th 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.    

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.