Bre'r Rabbit

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIV, Issue 6, 8 February 1906, Page 1

Brer Rabbit

Is Brer Rabbit declining in New Zealand ? It seems that he is, if we are to judge by the diminishing numbers of the burrowing pest that are finding their way to the world's cooking pot and felt hat and kid glove. In our export meat trade there has been a steady decline in ra'bMt-figures from 6,501,997 in 1900 to. a relatively paltry 3,7»88,57'6 in 1904 ; while the skins of the c critters ' that have been sent out of the Colony have fallen in an almost .unbroken progression from 17^,041,106 in 1893 to a mere 6,103,930 in 1904. The good rabbit, like the good Injun, is the dead one. In 1904 he dropped £86,931 into the pocket of New Zealand ; and the current ' Official Year-Book ' pleads in consequence that ' rabbits can hardly now be looked upon as wholly worthless '—which seems rather a truism. • Our neighbors beyond the Tasman Sea in Victoria are in worse, or better, case, according to the point af view. Last year they exported no fewer than 12,585,506 rabbits. The plague seems to be growing there. And the long and ever-lengthening array of rodent ' stiffs '' sets us a-wondering what has become of Mr. Pounds' chicken-cholera microbe, and the Rabbit and Vermin Exterminating Company of ''Australasia (Registered), and the trap-yards, and the ' drives,' and the poisoned water, and the deadly pie-melon, and the strychnine and apple-jam, and the phosphorised wheat, and the arsenicated chaff and pollard and grain, and the various asphyxiating '(or choke-damp) machines, and Pateman's patent rabbit-exterminator, and the thousand and one other ways and means which were devised by our cousins across the water to get the rabbit off the local earth, or to reduce his depredations to the limits of possible toleration. ' Dey ain't no smart man,' says Uncle Reittus, ' 'cept wat dey's a smarter.' Brer Rabbit in the Australian bush, like Brer Rabbit in the Old Plantation, seems to know more trick's than either Brer Fox or Brer Man. But his trump card is probably (if we may use the expression) his voluminous fecundity.