"The Rabbit Nuisance," Plains Folk #690 (Copyright Hoy & Isern)

I was sitting in the offices of the Central Otago News, in Alexandra, New Zealand, looking up reports on the Easter Bunny Shoot-Out (subject of my last Plains Folk column). In came John Field, the lead reporter for the News, who decided to interview me as a visiting authority. (I must be some sort of expert, because I came from 10,000 miles away.) Then John said, "I'm going out to Earnscleugh to take some photos of the rabbiting crew. You want to come along?"

I did. For years I had been studying the history of the rabbit nuisance in New Zealand--how the European gray rabbit was introduced and became a major pest, how people had tried to control the pest, and what the whole problem could teach us about agriculture and the environment. I knew that the most famous, most rabbit-infested sheep station in the country was Earnscleugh. In 1991 my wife and I had visited Earnscleugh, where its lavish, castle-like residence and grounds belied its troubled ecological state. Station operator Alistair Campbell, assisted by government subsidy, already had spent millions of dollars on pest control, with little apparent effect.

As John and I drove onto the station, it was apparent that all the expenditure finally had paid off. The condition of forage seemed much better, and rabbit infestation seemed confined to certain intractable, remote, sunny-slope locations.

Rabbit control on Earnscleugh had been turned over to a contractor. This fellow had spent years working for the government rabbit eradication program, the Rabbit and Land Management Programme, and on its expiration had gone private. He assembled a crew of men, vehicles, and dogs, and went to work for Campbell.

John and I found the rabbiting outfit preparing for a day's work in the field. They had been night shooting the evening before, and now they were going out for daytime clean-up in brushy areas.

The boss of the outfit, khaki-clad, drove a 4-wheel-drive ute (utility vehicle, like a pick-up) with a dog box on the back. He was flanked by two motorcycle riders, fellows who seemed dedicated to perpetuation of the reputation of rabbiters as societal outcasts. One of them--tattooed, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, dragging on a cigarette--looked bad to the bone. The other, a teenager, was a wannabee.

Two scabbards hung from the handlebars of each motorcycle. One contained a .22 magnum with a scope, the other a pump 12-gauge shotgun, extra-full choke, shooting #3 shot on a light load of fast powder.

Around them ranged the dogs--a lab, two springers, and a couple of nondescript beasts. The dogs served to push the rabbits out of the briar for the shooters. The crew would work that day, they said, until the dogs played out--which wouldn't be long, because it was a warm day.

Driving back to town, I was trying to remember what this reminded me of, and then it hit me--coyote hunters. Remember when guys bought those old cars and cut holes in the tops of them for shooters, and kept packs of hounds, and devised dog boxes to carry the dogs and drop them when a coyote was sighted, and went roaring through the draws and stubble fields? Nobody knows how many fences they demolished in hot pursuit.

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