A RABBIT REMEDY.

Timaru Herald, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 13017, 3 July 1906, Page 3

A RABBIT REMEDY.

An article in the " Pastoralists' Review "- suggests that a remedy for the rabbit pest in Australia, or even in cooler New land, rhdght be found in the red ant, of South Africa. Mr Douglas Blackburn, editor of the "Johannesburg Daily Express," and an experimenter in small farming, wrote to Lord Avebury (Sir John Lubbock, a well-known student of ant life) a full description of his failure to raise rabbits in the open in Transvaal, though' he could breed them in and he suggested that the ant would clear, off the pest in Australia. Further correspondence led. to' a detailed description of the experiments being given by Mr Blackburn to the London manager of the Australian Mortgage Company. The the suimx.ary paragraphs of this letter : "Ten years' attempts at rearing rabbits' in Natal, Transvaal, and Orange River Colony,* in various clijftates, but under apparently perfect conditions a» to food supply, have shown nothing but disaster. Two years' close observation of my own and other fanners' experiments have proved' ,that the red meat-eating ant is a ferocious attacker of the newly-born rabbits when in> the burrow. . . All "fur-> bearing animals of the veldt born naked have their breeding places in spots 'free 1 from red ants. Meerkats hide and hunt among ant-hills, but never breed near them. '. i . A report to this effect" was made by jme to the Transvaal Minister of Agriculture and considered so conclusive by him *&at he refused' the request of a farmers' association to prohibit the importation of rabbits as and referred them to my Teport." This' red ant swarms on lower South Africa, but is not regarded as a serious nuisance. It is a v scavenger, cleaning the bones left by four-footed carnivora, and Mr Blackburne says it does not attack newly-born lambs, "and that it cannot become a nuisance about a house ibecause fowls devour the ants greedily.