Transcript
THE AOTEAROA HISTORY SHOW: Rabbits and other Pests
WILLIAM: In 1857, 22 year-old Watson Shennan was trudging along the Knobby Range in Central Otago.
He and his brother Alexander came from a big sheep farming family from the Southwest of Scotland. They were looking for land to do the same thing in New Zealand.
MĀNI: As the brothers crested the ridge and looked down into the Manuherikia Valley. Watson realised they’d found the perfect spot. He turned to his brother and said:
"Here is the country we are looking for; a land well-grassed and watered — a very land of promise.”
WILLIAM: To start with, things went well. Just like Watson said, Central Otago was perfect sheep country.
A boom in wool prices, combined with the goldrush in the 1860s made Otago and Southland the economic heart of New Zealand.
MĀNI: But a few decades later, everything had changed...
“Hills and gullies that used to be a scene of perfect sylvan beauty ... now look like a deserted waste, as though some deluge had swept vegetation off the earth.”
WILLIAM: So, what happened? Well… this happened [points at rabbit]
INTRO SEQUENCE
WILLIAM: The rabbit plagues of the 19th century were one of the greatest economic and environmental disasters in New Zealand history.
They turned thousands of hectares of farmland into desert, and sucked up millions of dollars in taxpayer money.
And they prompted people to introduce voracious new predators to Aotearoa which are still devastating native wildlife today.
MĀNI: Not the best decision of all time…
WILLIAM: Nope..
MĀNI: So let’s start with how rabbits got here in the first place, just like pretty much every other mammal in New Zealand they hitched a ride with humans.
WILLIAM: The first introduced mammals were the kiore and kuri, Polynesian rats and dogs, brought to Aotearoa by the ancestors of Māori about 700 years ago.
MĀNI: Several hundred years later, in 1769, Royal Navy Lieutenant James Cook arrived, and his first expedition introduced a bunch of new animals.
Some were stowaways like ship-rats. Others were accidental escapees like cats which had been brought along to keep the rats under control.
WILLIAM: There were also goats, sheep and pigs which were deliberately released into the bush, or gifted to Māori.
MĀNI: But when Cook arrived back in New Zealand on his second voyage he learned some had been eaten rather than kept for breeding and complained…
“Thus all our endeavours for stocking this country with useful animals are likely to be frustrated by the very people who we meant to serve” - James Cook.
WILLIAM: This idea that New Zealand needed more “useful” animals was very strong among early European explorers and colonists. And we’re not just talking about farm animals.
Colonists tried to improve pest control by introducing insect-eating animals like sparrows and hedgehogs.
MĀNI: They tried to “improve” hunting by bringing deer, pheasants and ducks.
WILLIAM: Some even tried introducing more exotic animals like moose, monkeys and zebra.
MĀNI: Many of these animals failed to adapt, but others thrived and some became serious pests. Which brings us back to rabbits...
The first rabbits came to New Zealand in the 1830s but we don’t know exactly who brought them here and in what numbers.
Historian Joan Druett puts it like this.
“The records of the introduction of rabbits are unclear, mostly because, once introduction became an embarrassing topic no-one was anxious to claim responsibility.”
WILLIAM: The American writer Mark Twain put it even more bluntly when he visited Otago in 1895.
"The man who introduced the rabbit there was banqueted and lauded; but they would hang him now, if they could get him."
MĀNI: Rabbit introduction was a joint effort by individual colonists, and acclimatisation societies - these were like government supported clubs which raised money to import all kinds of animals.
WILLIAM: And one of the animals they were hop-timistic about, were rabbits
In their eyes, rabbits were the perfect animal to bring to a new colony... easy to carry on ships, they bred fast, you could eat them, and sell their skins. So useful!
MĀNI: But, if there is one thing rabbits love, it’s making more rabbits.
Your average rabbit starts breeding at three months old, and it can produce a new litter of six or more baby bunnies nine times a year.
WILLIAM: In ideal conditions, you can go from two rabbits to a million rabbits in just one year.
As early as 1866 parts of Southland were overrun and the rabbits were moving north into Otago.
MĀNI: It turned out the lower South Island was a rabbit paradise covered with tussock grassland - perfect rabbit food.
There wasn’t too much rain, so their burrows didn’t flood. And the only native predators were Weka and Kāhu - neither of which put a dent in their exploding numbers.
WILLIAM: In 1867 a group of worried farmers wrote to the Otago Acclimatisation Society warning against more releases, but the Society kept releasing more rabbits until the 1870s.
MĀNI: We have no idea how many rabbits were in New Zealand by the 1870s. Tens of millions? A hundred million? There were far too many to count.
WILLIAM: The newspapers were full of farmers worrying about rabbits. One correspondent said:
“Incredible as it may appear, I have seen a field of 40 acres completely denuded of grass, and thousands of those four footed pests hopping about its surface. Throughout Southland rabbits swarm — in fact are a plague, ruinous alike to crops and pasturage”
MĀNI: Some farmers reported huge numbers of sheep starving to death, or becoming so weak they couldn’t stand.
WILLIAM: But rabbits were actually only part of the problem. To understand this, we have to wind back about 500 years.
Before humans came to Aotearoa, Otago and Southland were mostly covered in forest.
When Māori arrived, much of that forest was burned down. Probably to make it easier to hunt moa.
MĀNI: By the time European colonists turned up, that forest had been replaced by tussock grasslands.
Then, those colonists started their own fires.
Colonial farmers set fire to their land because sheep find it easier to eat the new growth which shoots up after a fire.
But some farmers burned their land too often, and overstocked with too many sheep, meaning the tussock didn’t have time to recover.
WILLIAM: So these plants were barely holding on as it was. Then rabbits came along and finished them off.
MĀNI: With the tussock gone, there was nothing to hold the topsoil together. In just a few decades, massive areas of productive farmland in Otago and Southland had turned to desert.
According one story, when a government official visited Central Otago to see the damage he said:
“This country is not worth saving — let the rabbit have it,”
WILLIAM: Many farmers abandoned their land. Others held on. At the height of the plague, one Otago runholder recorded his yearly produce like this:
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Two bales of wool taken from live sheep.
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Five bales plucked from dead sheep.
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Six bales of rabbit skins.
MĀNI: At first, farmers caught and killed rabbits themselves, but by the 1880s most turned to professional rabbit catchers, or rabbiters… many of whom were former gold-miners.
WILLIAM: Rabbiters had a hard life. They’d ride over the grasslands, setting traps, spreading poison and gathering your catch, often more than a hundred rabbits a day.
By nightfall every one of them had to be gutted, skinned and hung out to dry.
As one rabbiter called Lew Warhlich said:
“By the time you’d done all that, come back at night, cooked your meal and fed your horse and tied your dogs up, and did the little bit of washing up you had to do in a tin basin or whatever, the day was gone. It was a lonely life. The horse and dogs were all [the company] you had.”
MĀNI: Lots of rabbiters were single men living alone in ramshackle huts or tents. But some started families.
Doris Jackson and her husband lived in a rabbiters camp in the Lindis Valley with two preschool aged children.
Their hut was 2 and a half by 3 metres, with a corrugated iron roof and canvas walls.
Inside was an armchair Doris made out of packing case timber and sugar bags stuffed with tussock, plus a bed just big enough for the four of them.
“We lived in primitive conditions but it was always home, always callers coming. In between work we had many happy times attending country dances etc … We had good health, were a family, had good friends around us and we were progressing financially.”
WILLIAM: In fact, the Jackson family eventually made enough money to buy a small orchard. And they weren’t the only ones making a living from rabbits.
Rabbit skin hats and gloves were super popular in Europe and North America and by the 1890s New Zealand was exporting 17 million skins a year.
Rabbit meat canning factories were set up all over Otago and Southland, and after refrigerated shipping was invented in 1882 we exported frozen rabbit meat as well.
MĀNI: From the perspective of the working poor, the rabbit plague was kind of a good thing. It provided a lot more jobs than sheep farming did. Especially in the Long Depression of the 1880s and the Great Depression of the 1930s
WILLIAM: Landowners sold the rights to kill rabbits on their land, so they made money from rabbit skins and meat too.
But for them, the profit from rabbits never outweighed the losses in wool production, and the cost in damage to pasture.
MĀNI: Politicians were under constant pressure to find solutions to the rabbit problem.
WILLIAM: Some New Zealanders demanded heavy fines for landowners who failed to get rid of rabbits,
MĀNI: But others argued these strict policies put unfair burdens on famers.
WILLIAM: Politicians built hundreds of kilometres of rabbit-proof fences,
MĀNI: But it turned out those fences weren’t as rabbit proof as they hoped
WILLIAM: The government lowered taxes on ammunition for shooting rabbits, and offered bounties for rabbit ears.
MĀNI: But that just encouraged people to cut off the rabbits ears and let them go.
WILLIAM: This was a common theme in rabbit pest control. Sure rabbiters would catch plenty of rabbits but they were always careful to leave some alive.
After all, if the rabbits vanished completely, so would their jobs.
MĀNI: The government was getting frustrated.
In 1883 the Superintending Inspector of Rabbits, Benjamin Bayly, told Parliament...
“No means of destruction have been devised or adopted that deals comprehensively with the pest. ... I see but one solution. And that is the introduction of [their] natural enemy.”
WILLIAM: By “natural enemy”, Benjamin Bayly meant things which eat rabbits. And he wasn’t alone.
According to historian Joan Druett, one animal dealer in Dunedin offered five shillings per cat to meet the demand.
“The small boys of Dunedin had a heyday and the cats arrived in short order. These were sold to pastoralists, taken out onto the run and released - just as police were being bombarded with complaints from hundreds of pet owners that their beloved moggies were missing.”
MĀNI: But cats alone weren’t cutting it, so people started to look at introducing other predators - particularly ferrets, stoats and weasels.
When the news made it back to Professor Alfred Newton, an Ornithologist at Cambridge University in the UK, he hit the roof.
“[The proposal] to send out ferrets or polecats to New Zealand, there to be turned loose, has filled me with alarm and horror. … what remains of [New Zealand's Native Birds] will absolutely and almost instantaneously disappear.”
WILLIAM: Many local scientists agreed, and even some farmers.
And today we can look back and say, of course they were right! But at the time, the pro-predator faction said the fears over introduced predators were overhyped...
“We look to Britain, and find that notwithstanding the presence in numbers of foxes, stoats, [and] weasels, ... lambs are reared, the birds of the air survive, and the poultry of the farmyard are not among things of the past. So will it be ... in New Zealand. Nature has a method of preserving a balance amongst her numerous subjects.”
MĀNI: What that writer and many others failed to understand was that Aotearoa was nothing like Britain.
Professor Newton pointed this out in his letter back in 1876.
“ [New Zealand’s] fauna is altogether ignorant of any enemy, such as a [ferret] would be; and - as you know, many of its birds — the likes of which do not exist elsewhere— are unable to fly.”
WILLIAM: But there was another argument.
Many 19th century colonists described New Zealand’s birds as “decadent” and “inferior” and doomed to extinction, much in the same way they described Māori as “decadent” and “inferior” and doomed to extinction.
They argued any attempt at conservation was pointless.
MĀNI: The Rodney MP John Sheehan said this in a debate over setting up reserves for native forest in 1874.
“The same mysterious law which appears to operate when the white and brown races come into contact — and by which the brown race, sooner or later, passes from the face of the earth — applies to native timber .... The moment civilization and the native forest come into contact, that moment the forest begins to go to the wall'.
But, there’s a problem with that statement right? Because this isn’t some natural mysterious law. It’s about choices.
People were choosing to cut down native forest.
People were choosing to take land from Māori and give it to colonists.
And people were choosing to introduce new predators which they knew would devastate native animals.
And our mate Professor Newton, pointed this out:
“You may say that the New Zealand fauna is already doomed, and indeed I fear that the greater part of it will become extinct; but we know not which, or how many of its members may be preserved, if some care or consideration be shown towards it.”
WILLIAM: But many colonists saw Aotearoa as a blank canvas where they could create a new better version of Europe.
There was no room on that canvas for New Zealand’s native plants, animals and people.
Here’s how John Turnbull Thomson put it. He was the Surveyor General of New Zealand in the 1870s.
“Crude sentiment regrets the waning of the aboriginal race; mature judgment cannot. For we ask ourselves, is it better to have a forbidding wilderness fixed in gloomy forest and tangled fern, or a lovely garden set in green fields and waving corn?”
And look, not every Pākehā thought like this. Plenty pushed back.
But they were up against powerful ideologies, and they were up against economics.
MĀNI: So in the end, the conservationists lost the argument. As one Otago Farmer and Politician reportedly said…
“If it came to a question of birds or sheep I would certainly vote in favour of the sheep.”
Between 1884 and 1886, 4 thousand ferrets, 3-thousand-and-99 weasels and 1-hundred-and-37 stoats were released into the wild.
Their impact on rabbits is unclear. Some farmers reported huge success, others saw no change.
WILLIAM: On the other hand, Professor Newton’s warnings about the risks to native wildlife were spot on.
As the Otago Witness reported in 1918:
“In the Hollyford Valley … the weka, kiwi, and kakapō were almost exterminated. In the Makarora Valley these used to be plentiful, but since the advent of the stoats and weasels they are very rare, and rabbiting tallies have not depreciated.”
MĀNI: In the meantime, the impact of rabbits on sheep farmers subsided. Partly thanks to rabbit control methods, but mostly due to refrigerated shipping.
Refrigeration meant sheep farmers could export meat as well as wool, which offset the losses from rabbits.
WILLIAM: The thing which finally ended the rabbit plague was fashion. In the 1940s, people stopped wearing rabbit skin hats and gloves.
Prices plunged, and New Zealand's rabbit industry collapsed.
MĀNI: With nobody making money from catching them, rabbit numbers, at first, went through the roof.
WILLIAM: But it also meant there was nobody arguing in favour of rabbits so the government could get serious about systematic extermination.
MĀNI: And thanks to some technological leaps over the next few decades, they had a whole lot more tools in their rabbit killing arsenal.
Mostly these were new kinds of poisons - particularly 1080 which could be dropped from the air, vastly reducing the costs of control in remote areas.
WILLIAM: The government also passed new anti-rabbit laws.
They outlawed the sale of skins and meat to remove any incentive for rabbit farming. In fact it was illegal to even keep pet rabbits in New Zealand until 1980.
MĀNI: And this tough stance on rabbits worked! For a while at least... By the 1960s and 70s areas of Otago and Southland which had been reduced to wasteland started growing grass again.
WILLIAM: It would be nice to say everyone lived happily ever after but… Not so much. Hungry stoats and weasels swarmed off farms and into the bush looking for food, which was bad news for native birds
MĀNI: And in the 1970s authorities took their foot off the gas. The official policy shifted from eradication to management.
WILLIAM: This turned out to be a mistake. By the 1990s New Zealand was facing another rabbit plague
MĀNI: This time a huge argument erupted about a new method of control - a deadly rabbit disease Calicivirus.
WILLIAM: The government initially refused to use the virus, so in 1997 a group of farmers illegally imported and released the disease themselves.
As one said:
“For years we’d been forced to stand by and watch as rabbits denuded our paddocks and turned them into a dustbowl. It was a simple choice: get calici or go bankrupt.”
MĀNI: And even though the release of the calicivirus was a major breach of New Zealand’s biosecurity laws, nobody was ever prosecuted.
WILLIAM: For the next couple of decades rabbit numbers plunged, but now… yet again… that’s starting to change.
MĀNI: Today, increasing numbers of rabbits are immune to calicivirus and populations are growing rapidly.
In 2021 journalist Melanie Reid wrote this about a visit to one farm in Otago.
“The infestation is obvious. Dozens of rabbits hop about on the dirt. And it is just dirt. Some paddocks are somewhat protected, others are dustbowls riddled with burrows, forfeited entirely to the pests.”
WILLIAM: The history of rabbits is a story of supposedly “useful” animals that turned out to be anything but.
MĀNI: It’s also a story of short term solutions and long term consequences. Consequences which are still playing out now, nearly a hundred years later.
WILLIAM: Thanks for watching our show!
