WILD RABBITS.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3104, 9 June 1881, Page 2

WILD RABBITS.

[To thb Editor of the Daily Telegbaph.] Sib, —Why is it men are such perverse creatures? Once let a belief, however erroneous, get into their heads, and how hard to induce them to believe otherwise than they are determined to believe. Iα the case of the rabbits known to be on many of our runs, how resolutely some of us maintain they are merely tame rabbits. How vain for others holding a different opinion, to assert if not positively the Wairarapa wild rabbit, yet of a certainty a cross. In one of your issues Mr A. St. Hill is named as stating it his belief the grey rabbits he and his friend brought back with them after a day's rabbiting to be exactly alike those he faw killed whilst he was in Wairarapa. He now tells me he saw a couple of those which were shot by a sporting youth on last Queen's birthday, and these were in every respect kindred rabbits to those previously mentioned, although shot miles away from the first lot. Others are equally convinced that the Wairarapa wild rabbit is amongst us, and yet our Rabbit Commissioners still hold aloofdoing nothing, absolutely nothing. Now, Sir, admitting Mr A. St. Hill knows nothing of wild rabbits, has not been down to Wairarapa, seen them shot, caught by dogs, poisoned and snared ; that he listens to every old wowan'e story, and has not himself gone to Akitio and Ohanga to ascertain how far along the coast northward wild rabbits have spread—admitting this, and also that Mr W. Beetbam is no authority on wild rabbits, though it is costing him some £1500 a year to keep them down on the Beaucepitt property, that his statement of wild rabbits spreading at the rate of ten or twelve miles a year goes for nothing; what will upholders of '.he tame rabbit belief say when on unimpeachable evidence it is shown the grey rabbits seen on many of our inland runs are unquestionably the wild grey rabbit of Old England imported here ? I take my stand on the fact that a, gentleman, whose card gives the name of Mr W. Herbert Jones, agent for the disposal of a work entitled the " History of the World," whilst pheasant shooting at Taradale, came across a number of rabbits; he shot one, to his surprise found it to be the grey wild rabbit he hae since he was a boy often shot on his father's property in Devonshire. Mr Herbert Jones is still in Hawke's Bay; let doubters question him on this subject, and they will find by description the grey rabbit he shot at "Taradale is no more nor less than the Wairarapa wild rabbit, the same as those on the runs given by one of your correspondents asserted by Mr A. St. Hill to be the grey wild rabbit of Wairarapa.—l am, &v.,. Grey Rabbit. June 6, 1881.