RABBITS.

Waipa Post, Volume I, Issue 17, 13 June 1911, Page 2

RABBITS.

(TO THE ECiTOR.)

SIR,- — A’ case of particular hardship affecting one, and possibly more, of our struggling settlers came under my notice yesterday, and appears to call for some ventilation. My advice to the unfortunate concerned was to write to the Minister for Agriculture for redress. The settler says that the Maori lands adjoining him were “ poisoned ” by Government rabbiters without any word of warning to himself or other pakeha neighbours, so as to enable them to safeguard their stock from the risk of the poisoned rabbits escaping to, and dying on the cultivated lands of the white man. Through this neglect by the Government employees to notify the pakeha neighbours, this unfortunate settler lost pigs to the value of £25. ihe disadvantage, or more correctly, the curse under which a settler suffers when he abuts on Maori land is, and has long been well known, but it is one of the well-deserved penalties of the indifference possessing the Dominion which allows itself to “sit quiet” under the deadly slight cast upon it by our Premier in appointing a Maori of Maoris to act as his deputy during his long absences. This latest trouble of the white settler is even worse .than his being prosecuted and fined for allowing the rabbit that breeds and thrives on the neglected Maori lands, to use his cultivated lands as a playground, to say nothing of the havoc worked on his crops. I understand the white settler has' to pay the Government 4d per lb for poison, while the “ poor downtrodden” Maori, I am told, gets it and has it laid for nothing. Serves us right. If we are indifferent to the condition of things at the fountain head, we must expect the streams to' be murky. —lam, etc., PAKEHA.