Hunting Rabbits

Rabbits are beloved in America, correct? I mean there's Bugs Bunny, a charming, humorous do-gooder who knows full well how clever he is when he opens, "What's up Doc?" Such poise, such self-assurance, even insouciance. Only a monster would ever dream of harming a rabbit. Then there's dear, sweet, adventurous Peter Rabbit, who unwisely disobeys his mother and almost gets caught by the farmer.  

Not a shred of shame surfaces when I freely admit that I have killed thousands of rabbits: I've dug them out of their warren, sent ferrets down their holes to chase them out into nets, caught them with dogs, shot them with rifles, trapped them with buried steel jaws that grab them, and, most efficient, poisoned them with strychnine sprinkled on thistle roots.

All of that carnage was perpetrated before I was sixteen years old, quite willingly, while on vacation, and for a while living on my Uncle Hugh's sheep station in Australia. Rabbits, you see, destroy sheep grazing land.

Rabbits even in the semi-wild have communal meeting places where they all defecate their small pellets of what looks like finely ground grass turned brown. Their droppings form mounds about the length of their bodies.  A good place to leave a root pellet of poison is near one of those mounds dropped into a strike of a mattuck which leaves freshly turned soil. The next morning the dead can be found, white belly up, next to the disturbed earth. In one night we brought home for skinning nearly 400 rabbits whose skins brought in about 40 Pounds, Aust. All of that was so long ago it would be impossible to translate that amount into present day dollars. (Well, I do remember my Uncle buying a used motorcycle for 150 pounds.) For us children it was a fortune. One time the money was taken from us, because the amount was too large for "children." The manager of one of the properties bought his own place, using what he'd saved from salary and earned from rabbit skins.

Rabbits caught in traps, or pulled out of burrows, have to be killed. It's done by stretching the rabbits neck while holding both legs with the other hand. Little boys, I swear, think nothing of it.

I believe this truth about young boys is capitalized on by MS Rowling in her six books about children. Oh, it's covered over, but just beneath the surface the motor of the fiction is softly humming.

Barry