THE RABBIT.

Southland Times, Issue 17697, 8 July 1914, Page 4

THE RABBIT.

A correspondent yesterday offered some comment upon the remarks made by Mr Gilkison at Friday’s meeting of the Invercargill branch of the Southland League with regard to the relative advantage of the district of sheep and rabbits. Our correspondent ac-> cepted the statement that ten rabbits eat and destroy as much grass as a sheep, but he calculated that ten rabbits wil.' yield a profit of 255, whereas a sheep will yield a profit of 10s, and the conclusion he arrived at was apparently. that where ten rabbits are maintained instead of one sheep the district is indirectly 15s better off. Rut the fatal objection to this reasoning is that the rabbit is not capable of support 1 ng an industry in the same sense as the sheep. While we have probab’y 8,000,000 rabbits in Southland we get from the industry only £60,000. If we could substitute for these myriads of rabbits 800,000 sheep we would get a certain return of £400,000. It is quite obvious, therefore, that we lose heavily by the rabbit, and in this connection a comment may be made upon a valuable suggestion thrown out by Mr Hunt om Monday. Mr Hunt entirely agrees with Mr Gilkison’s view', and his idea is that the rabbit could be eradicated by the simple plan of making a rabbit proof fence a legal fence, that is a fence half the cost of which the farmer is entitled to recover from his neighbour. It is rather a striking fact that sheep on the hill-tops of Otago and‘ Southland return a lower profit than sheep on similar country in any other part of Australia, and the reason can only be that in Otago and Southland a large part of the feed is consumed by rabbits and the carrying capacity of the land is greatly reduced. Whether the suggestion that a wire-netting fence, should be made a legal fence is feasible we do not know, but it looks feasible, it is reasonable to argue that if half the cost could be recovered farmers who wanted to get rid of tho rabbits would put up ware netting fences, and then even those who were more indifferent would probably complete the enclosure of their property. In fact the activity of their neighbours would most likely compel them to. With rabbit-proof fencing the extermination of the rabbit presents no great difficulty. We suspect that our correspondent “Free Trader” wrote in a somewhat jocular strain, but if hs was se l lous he w r ill have to advance some more convincing argument to demonstrate that the rabbit is a source of profit. In the meantime the figures cited leave little room for doubt that Southland would gain enormously by destroying the rabbits, and if the rabbit car. be put down by some such, means as that suggested by Mr Hunt some action should he taken. At all events the proposal deserves the consideration of the fanners and pastoralIsts who are most closely concerned, and some expression of opinion from them would he welcome.