The National Museum of Australia notes that on Christmas Day in 1859, Thomas Austin, a self-made man and wealthy settler, released 13 wild European rabbits on his estate in Victoria, Australia. By 1866, seven years after the release, hunters had shot 14,000 rabbits on the estate. Sometimes small choices can end up reshaping a whole continent. The rabbits were let go for people to hunt for sport. The release marked the start of one of Australia’s major pest problems.
In 1950, trials with myxomatosis, a virus that affects rabbits, were renewed, and the disease spread at incredible speed after rain brought more mosquitoes. In a 2012 paper in Wildlife Research, Brian Cooke of the University of Canberra examined the rabbit’s place in Australian ecosystems. By the late 1940s, rabbit numbers had climbed to 600 million.
Instead, it became a lesson in how quickly an introduced animal can take over when food, cover, and few predators are in alignment. Rabbits, too, were a free source of meat in lean years, and during the 1930s Depression, many people shot them for food or trapped them. Later scientists started to look at disease. But the rabbits began to develop resistance, just as they later did to the virus known as calicivirus. Their numbers are now on the rise again. His review notes that wild rabbits have degraded many natural Australian ecosystems and any beneficial role they play is small by comparison. Cooke also concluded that rabbits could be controlled adequately to begin restoration of the ecosystem, but that a high level of control was necessary. The author Brian Coman, quoted by the museum, calls the rabbit the country’s most serious vertebrate pest. Austin’s release was meant to add a little sport to his estate. It is also a warning against moving animals to places where the local ecosystem has no natural defenses against them.
