"Easter Bunnies," Plains Folk #688 (Copyright Hoy & Isern)

This is the time of year when in the Dakotas and Montana, taverns organize gopher-shooting contests. Other parts of the plains have prairie dog competitions or coyote roundups. All such events are liable to censure by animal rights organizations, which managed to close down a coyote contest out west of the Missouri a couple of years ago. Public attitudes have changed since the great Kansas jackrabbit drives of the 1930s or the FFA pest contests of the 1960s.

I was thinking about all this a couple of months ago while traveling through another semiarid grassland, Central Otago, on the South Island of New Zealand. This is a wonderful piece of country. Most of the land is held by pastoralists--sheep farmers operating on stations of from 5000 to 50,000 acres. Along the stream valleys, and on some of the terraces, all sorts of specialty industries have moved in--deer farms, orchards, and most recently, wineries. This makes quite a dynamic local society.

It is a new society that continues to struggle with an old enemy--the European gray rabbit. Rabbits were introduced to New Zealand back in the 1840s, and within a generation they had become a serious pest. As I tramped the hills of Central Otago, the sunny slopes were alive with scurrying rabbits and pocked with their warrens. At night spotlights played across distant hills and shots echoed over the land, as night shooters did their work to reduce the rabbit nuisance.

That brings me to the Easter Bunny Shoot-Out. Yearly since 1991 the town of Alexandra, in the heart of Central, has organized a rabbit-shooting contest over a weekend around Easter. I read reports on the contests of the past few years, courtesy of the Central Otago News.

In 1993 235 shooters driving 4-wheel-drives and armed with rifles and shotguns showed up and organized themselves into teams. The teams drew for shooting blocks--tracts of land where the owners had invited competitors in to shoot. The event was hampered by wet weather, but over two days the shooters still managed to bring in 7607 rabbits (down from some 8480 the year before). The following year the total declined further, to 5964.

The organizer, Martin McPherson, explained, "I put it down to the fact that the teams did not cheat as much as in previous years." It seems that competitors were shooting rabbits for weeks in advance of the competition and stockpiling them in freezers.

With rabbit totals down, a local rabbit-processing company offered a prize for the best hard-luck story. The champion liars claimed someone had stolen 300 of their rabbits from a shed, and so in protest they had shot another 700, but delivered only three to contest headquarters. The runners-up explained they had been diverted from rabbit hunting when they sighted a moa (a giant, extinct bird similar to an emu or ostrich) and gone off in fruitless pursuit.

1995 was the high point for controversy in the Easter Bunny Shoot-Out. To the embarrassment of the many all-male teams involved, an all-women team captained by one Julie Dale won the contest, reporting in with 1217 rabbits, three wild goats, two possums, six trout, a feral cat, and the event organizer, Martin McPherson, who was struck in the shoulder by a stray pellet. Carping critics said the team was assisted by male friends, but the male friends said they only ran a "rapid bunny pick-up service."

I wish I could have stayed around for the 1996 event. McPherson said he expected 2000 shooters.

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