Rabbits (1860–1900)

Abstract

Wild European rabbits brought to New Zealand for shooting sport were totally different from the harmless domestic rabbits, already present and useful only for food. From their first arrival in the 1860s, wild rabbits over-ran the newly established pastoral runs in Otago, Marlborough and Hawke’s Bay. From the 1870s, rabbits spread across all open country in plague numbers, ruining the pastures and thereby devastating the wool clip and lambing rate of malnourished ewes, and the profits of previously wealthy runholders. Nineteenth-century science was based on the traditional idea of ‘the balance of nature’; therefore, the obvious reason why rabbits in New Zealand behaved so differently from their less abundant British ancestors was that they had been imported without natural enemies. The colonial government passed anti-rabbit legislation, and in 1881 appointed Benjamin Bayly to administer it and to organise the importation of suitable natural enemies. For eight years, Bayly fulfilled his mandate with vigour, despite minimal effect on rabbits and repeated criticism from naturalists at home and overseas. New income from rabbits could not replace lost profits from wool, so many runholders were bankrupted, but it did keep some struggling farmers on their own land until conditions improved.