American Rabbits Are Not Walt Disney Rabbits

Baby Eastern cottontail rabbits in a typical scrape nest. 

Proof that most Americans spend far too little time in field and forest is the startling level of ignorance about American rabbits and hares. It seems most people know more about the rabbits of Watership Down and Warner Bros. cartoons ("Shhhhh, we're waa-bit hunting!") than they do the living, breathing bunnies that live in the parks and pastures within walking distance of their homes.

First the simple fact: No North American rabbit or hare dens underground. Though there are a lot of rabbit species in North America, all are "cottontails" -- various species and subspecies of the Sylvilagus genus.

No species of Cottontail Rabbit digs earth dens like its European counterpart, nor do North American rabbits or hares have their young underground. The North American rabbit (Sylvilagus genus) is not closely related to its European counterpart (Oryctolagus genus) -- they split from each other hundreds of thousands of years ago.

This is not to say a rabbit will not tuck itself under an old truck, under a pallet of wood near a barn, or between hay bales, especially in the presence of dogs or humans. They will also dive into a groundhog hole to avoid a dog or to get out of the weather if a really strong storm sweeps in, but they do not dig the holes, nor do they enter them very deeply, nor do they stay in the mouth of a hole for very long.

While European rabbits make permanent communal burrows, North American rabbits make solitary (and well-concealed) "scrapes" on the surface of the soil. These scrapes (sometimes called "forms") are 6 or 7 inches long, about 5 inches wide, and about four inches deep. They are often shielded from view by tall grass and weeds. The mother rabbit will pull her own belly fur out in order to line the scrape and further hide the young (see picture, above). The mother rabbits will generally avoid the scrape during daylight hours when she might be seen, returning only under cover of darkness to feed her young. The baby rabbits, which are born without fur and with shut eyes, will be covered with fur and have open eyes in about 2 weeks, when they will begin to leave the nest and eat vegetation on their own.

The nesting density of cottontails is habitat-specific. In an unkempt orchard with thick grass you might find one rabbit next every 2 acres, while densities are likely to be about one nest per 7 acres in a rich hayfield, and 13 to 14 acres per nest in woodlands and dry rocky pasture.

A home range of three or four acres is very common for cottontails which, if chased, will stay within their home ranges rather than bolt cross country.

North America has hares too -- most of them we call "jack rabbits." Jack Rabbits and Snowshoe Hares are larger than most cottontails, have much larger ears, and are also faster. Unlike baby rabbits, which spend two or three weeks helpless in their nests, hares are born fully furred, eyes open, and ready to run "right out of the box". Hares build no nests of any sort.

Rabbits and Hares are "lagomorphs" -- a kind of primitive placental mammal dating back to the Paleocene times, about 62 million years ago in Asia. Along with rabbits and hares, this Order also includes the Pikas we find in the western US.

Lagomorphs practice "coprophagy" -- i.e. they eat their own feces. "First pass", rabbit pellets are greenish in color and are collected right from the animal's own anus. These rabbit pellets are then re-chewed in order to absorb all the nutrients in hard-to-digest plant material, much as a cow chews its cud.

By engaging in coprophagy, rabbits and hares are able to spend relatively little time exposed to predators in the field while feeding.


European rabbit warren near Susex, England.  The only American native rabbit that dens underground is the pygmy rabbit (about 1 pound in weight) which is extinct in its native Columbian Basin, with one species still extent in southern Idaho. 

Horses for Courses, But Fox Are the Same All Over

Red Fox Taxidermy manikin with 12.75" chest. Source.
A repost from 2011

Armas writes from Finland about a post I put up some years back about the history of Jagd Terriers.

To refresh, the Jagd Terrier was a dog created as part of the völkisch thought paradigm which suggested Germany needed its own working terrier which would, of course be an uber hund which could do it all -- retrieve shot birds, go to ground on fox, bolt boar from thickets, and perhaps brew a mean cup of espresso as well.

The dog that was created is certainly game enough, but it turns out that a dog that is big enough to return shot birds is too big to easily go to ground in most tight settes, while a dog that is small enough to go to ground may not have the weight or size needed to bust Russian Boar out of a thicket.  Yes, there is a reason dogs are specialized!

Amras, however, says his Jagd Terrier is doing fine for him in Finland.  He writes:

I wonder do you have smaller foxes there? Because here in Finland Jagds represent 25-35% share of the dogs used for underground hunting. I have a 16-inch tall male Jagd, weight about 11 kilos (24.25 pounds), and it manages on its job fairly well. But we do have a little different species here too. 75% of our catch are raccoon dogs, 15% badgers and the last 10% foxes. My opinion is that dachshund are really the ones that are really too big for underground work; their chest size has grown in recent decades mainly because of the impact of dog shows. You might want to visit German and the Central Europe first, before you announce the German Hunt Terrier isn't that much in use there, because it really is.

Armas is asking a good question, and the answer is interesting enough that I break it out here in its own post.    I wrote back last evening:

We have, more-or-less, the same-sized red fox all over the world.  See the links under the terrier-spanning post I put up on the blog this morning for more general information on fox size.

So what's the difference?  The difference is in the animal that actually digs the holes in which your fox are denning!

In Finland, you do not have European rabbits outside of a small population of recent escapees around Helsinki, so the holes in which your fox are going to ground are, for the most part, dug by badger, as your native hares den above ground.

In England, most fox dens are lightly excavated rabbit burrows, as badger dens are generally given a pass due to a rather unforgiving law.  In the Eastern U.S., where our rabbits den above ground (in scrapes) as your hares do, fox generally use old groundhog dens which, like U.K. rabbits dens, are very lightly excavated if expanded at all.

Fox are not very good diggers and rarely excavate a long or deep den on their own, preferring to tuck into an existing den of some kind (badger, rabbit or groundhog), or else den under a natural structure (a tree that has blown over, a farm trash pile, an out building, a rock crevice).

Raccoons and raccoon-dogs (Tanuki) do not dig their own holes, and neither do our "third" quarry species here in the United States, the opossum.

Our Grey fox (not related to the red fox) will generally den in trees (this is a species of fox that can climb) or rock cracks, but will also be found, on rare occassion, in groundhog dens.

With dachshunds, chest size is largely determined by breeding. The very badly bred standard dachshunds of the U.K. and the U.S. have large chests, as you note, but working dachshunds (also known as "Teckels") have a very clear emphasis on chest size. See >> Teckels that are "Gebraushund" for more information about these true working dogs.

The bottom line:  there is a very real reason that working terriers are spanned at the chest, and why most working terriers around the world hover a shade over 12 inches in height, and with chests of 14-15 inches in span (the same chest size as that of working dachshunds).

A dog that stands 16 inches tall at the shoulder is going to have a span of 18 to 19 inches, which is larger than any normal fox anywhere in the world.  That dog may work in Finland, where most fox are found to ground in old badger settes, but it will have a limited utility in those parts of the world where red fox, raccoon, or Tanuki (raccoon-dog) are using holes made by rabbit and groundhog.

As for how Jagd Terriers are doing in Germany and Central Europe, I think the rise of artificial earths, and cartoons showing Jagd Terriers barely squeezing through these artificial settes, says quite a lot.  A dog at the very lowest end of the Jagd Terrier standard (13" tall and with a small chest) is a good prospect for fox work, but at the taller end, I would simple say that there is a reason why terriermen harp about chest size the world over.

A dog, no matter how much it may have "the fire called desire" cannot hope to excavate a 20-foot pipe or follow a fox down a tight tube that is half-blocked by root or rock, unless it has a chest size comparable to the quarry it is chasing.

Once the larger dog does get there, it will find itself jammed in tight, with little room to move to avoid the slashing teeth of the fox.

And what is the point? A larger dog brings little that is useful to the table, and quite a lot that is a burden.

A fox cannot dig away from the dog, and even with animals that dig, size is not the answer as larger size slows passage through the sette and increases the chance that the badger or groundhog will have dug away. A smaller dog can get through a sette faster and "box" at the end more easily (and less damage) and with more oxygen as well. There is a reason small dogs are valued more than larger ones in the world of working terriers!

• Related Posts:
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  ** The Spread of Tanukis (Raccoon Dogs)
  ** Raccoon Dogs and Artificial Dens in Germany
  ** How Much Is That Dachshund in the Window?
  ** Cracking Tired Chestnuts About Form and Function
  ** The Good Stuff
  ** Measurement Informs, Exaggeration Deforms
  ** Artificial Dens, Big Dogs and Fair Chase

This is how a taxidermy manikin becomes a mount.

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The Archeology of Hunting

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Humans have spent most of their time on earth hunting, and it is not entirely surprising that there is at least some archaeological evidence of the activity.

In North American before Columbus, there were no metal tools or horses. Hunting was done entirely on foot, and hides and meat were hauled off by humans and dogs pulling travois skids.

In some rare locations a very efficient form of hunting was accomplished by running bison herds off of cliffs or "Buffalo Jumps" -- a fact we know today only because of the enormous piles of bison bones at the base of these cliffs, and the related stone tools and campfires.

Archaeologists have discovered that drive lines were made to direct herds of bison to the jumps. The drive lines consisted of rows of rock piles known as "dead men," arranged like a wide funnel that started up to 8 miles away from the jump site. The funnel gradually narrowed toward the jump end. Hunters hiding behind the "dead men" rock piles would spring out and wave robes and shout in order to frighten the animals and keep them inside the funnel and headed in a stampede towards the jump where they would tumble down, breaking legs and necks as they fell.

In Europe, large Deer Parks were created during the Middle Ages as a way of setting off land for aristocratic hunters and managing sustainable game populations for food. The edges of these parks were often edged by massive earthwork moats and mounds which, in turn, were topped by wooden fences. The moats were on the inside and prevented the deer from getting a foothold or a run-up to the top of the mound which was constructed from the earth taken from the moat excavation. Many UK locations with "Park" in their name are, in fact, old Deer Parks and with careful observation in some locations, you can see parts of remnant ditches and mounds.

As with the ancient Buffalo Jumps, hunting in deer parks was accomplished by driving game through funnel fences to archers who were positioned on the ground or in tree stands.

In the 14th Century there were over 3,000 deer parks in England occupying around 650,000 acres of land (over 1,000 squre miles). These deer parks were managed for wild game and for wood. In the larger deer parks streams were dammed to make small lakes and ponds for fishing and ice making.

Most of the large deer parks fell into disrepair in late Medieval times as the feudal system collapsed under the weight of the Plague, and a new form of hunting -- coursing with horses and dogs -- was imported from France.

Another archaeological remnant of hunting to be found in Europe are rabbit warrens. The rabbit is not naive to the UK -- it was introduced (probably from Spain) by the Romans shortly after the First Century AD. Across the UK ancient artificial warrens can be found to this day. These warrens are called "pillow mounds" or buries and are flat topped, 10 to 20 metres long, 5 to 10 metres wide, and up to a metre high, sometimes surrounded by a shallow ditch. About 2,000 of these ancient buries survive in England, and in some of them artificial runs are covered with stone slabs. Some of the very largest artificial warrens had professional staff (a warrener) and buildings.


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Duck and Fish Ponds provide additional archaeological evidence of hunting and angling across the globe. Many of these ponds have artificial islands on them created as spots where ducks and geese can breed free of predators. While the waters of these ponds were stocked with fish, the ponds were often designed with "dog-leg" lagoons, or a narrows on one end, where ducks and geese could be driven and easily netted.

The United States is a very young nation, and much of the Western U.S. was nearly devoid of people only 150 years ago. That said, Americans are industrious and the construction of small ponds and large lakes for water storage and ice-making naturally led to increased still-water angling and duck hunting.

In short order, some people began construction of dams specifically to increase angling and hunting opportunities. One such dam was constructed on the South Fork River near Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The dam itself was a massive earthen affair constructed by the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club which counted among its 66 wealthy Pittsburgh residents Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew W. Mellon, and Philander Knox.

At the time of its construction, the South Fork Dam was one of the largest in the world, but it was not well constructed. A flawed design was made worse when the Fishing and Hunting Club put screens across the safety spillway to prevent fish from washing over the dam during heavy rains. The spillway screens were constantly clogged with debris, but despite many warnings about the safety of the dam, the rich aristocrats who owned the hunting club continued on, business as usual.

On May 31, 1889, after a period of heavy rain, the dam finally gave way sending a 45-foot-tall wall of muddy water racing down the Conemaugh Valley. More than 2,209 lives were lost and 27,000 people were made homeless -- one of the greatest single losses of human life in the history of the United States.



Civilian Conservation Corps Tree Planters, 1939


The most notable period of U.S. construction for wildlife benefits began with the advent of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in 1936. The CCC was created as a Depression-era jobs program which eventually put millions of young men to work on reforestation, soil erosion, flood prevention, and trail construction projects across the United States..

The Corps was badly needed -- America had ruined scores of millions of acres of once-forested lands during the rip-rape-and-ruin robber baron era that lasted from 1850-1900.

Massive tracts of forest in our eastern mountains had been swept clean of trees, and streams were choked with silt. Wildlife had been shot out to the point that deer were nearly extinct, all beaver were gone, and ducks and geese were a rarity in areas where they had once been in dense numbers.

The Lacey act of 1907 and the Weeks Act of 1911 were important for protecting wildlife and conserving land, but wild America had been so severely hammered by unrestrained greed that it was to clear that it would take millions of hours of human labor and a lot of time to begin to set things right.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt started the ball rolling in 1934 with the appointment of Committee on Wild-Life Restoration whose mandate was to prepare a plan to restore America's dwindling wildlife populations. Among its members were the great wildlife manager Aldo Leopold, and cartoonist Ding Darling.

The Wild-Life Committee recommended far-reaching changes to improve habitat for waterfowl, upland game, mammals, and song birds, including the acquisition of millions of acres of additional sub-marginal lands for habitat improvement, and appropriations of $50 million to restore these lands to some semblance of their natural self.

It did not take a genius to see that the Wildlife Restoration Plan and the Civilian Conservation Corps were ideal partners, and under the tutelage of Darling -- a man who later went on to create the Federal Duck Stamp Program and found the National Wildlife Federation -- significant gains were made in record time.

By the end of 1942, national wildlife refuges, national forests, and other public lands across the U.S. had been improved by CCC workers who constructed dams, dikes and fish hatcheries, planted millions of trees to stabilize stream banks and cover over ruined land, and erected numerous buildings, fire towers, telephone lines and support facilities for camping grounds, and improved backcountry-access for hunters and hikers.

Civilian Conservation Corps construction projects remain a significant addition to our National Parks, National Forests and Wildlife Refuge System to this day, and are too-little heralded part of our American wildlife heritage.
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When Jack Rabbits Became Scapegoats

Jack Rabbit Hunt, Mead, Kansas, about 1919



After killing off the bison in the 1860s and 70s, importing immigrants to take over the land, and then plowing up the land to feed the armies of World War I Europe, grain production soared for a few wet years, producing a crop glut so severe that by 1925 three years worth of bounty sat rotting on the ground in some areas. The grain storehouses were full and no one wanted any more wheat at any price. Only so much could be turned into booze -- the rest was left to rot.

What to do? Why plant more land of course! If the price of wheat fell from $2 to $1 a bushel, then the only way to make the same amount of money as last year was to plant twice as much land. And so that's what people did, ripping up all the sod and all the land they could in the prairie states.  Life was hard, but there was still an export market for wheat to Europe.

Then in the summer of 1929, the Russian wheat embargo to Europe, which had started with World War I, and which had driven the export wheat economy in the United States, was lifted, further glutting the international market. At about the same time, the land speculation boom in Florida collapsed, and so too did the U.S. Stock market on October 29.

Over the course of the next three weeks in November of 1929, the stock market lost 40 percent of its value; more than thirty-five billion dollars in shareholder equity, a sum 11 times larger than the federal budget at that time.

What followed next was a general fiscal panic that quickly grew worse. It turned out that in thousands of local banks across the country, absent any regulation at all, local businessmen had taken people's savings and invested it in stocks or speculative local land deals. When panicked people came knocking for their money, there was no money to be had, and so banks closed overnight. Without federal regulation or bank insurance, what could anyone do?

The price of oil crashed soon after, falling from $1.30 a barrel to twenty cents and eventually to a dime. Across the entire nation, the bubble burst and the price of everything -- real estate in Florida, oil in Texas, wheat in Kansas, and stocks on Wall Street -- took a dive to the basement. The economy was in shambles.

Then, when the rain stopped, and the winds started blowing, large parts of the Great Plains that had been ripped open for wheat production, turned into massive dust clouds instead. Dust settled over everything, killing cattle and horses, burying fence posts and blowing east as far as New York City and Washington, and as far north as Chicago.

Both nature and the economy were now wildly out of swing. A plague of grasshoppers came out of Utah and Colorado, destroying crops.  Spiders and centipedes seemed to followed the dust.

With the ground dry and blowing, the economy in shreds, and people dead broke, unemployed and starting to go hungry, someone noticed the large numbers of Jack Rabbits about and decided they were too much competition for the few horses and cattle that remained. What to do? Why round them up and club them to death, of course.

And so jack rabbit roundups, which has begun in California in the 1890s, moved to places like Kansas, Oklahoma, Colorado and Texas.  Massive funnel-shaped pens were created, and hundreds of men, women and children drove the rabbits across the prairie to their death.

As Timothy Egan notes in The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl:

Rabbits had the run of the land, crowding fields, yards, streets. They were an easy source of food, but they also took away food, gnawing en masse in places where some farmers still hoped to raise a crop. People saw the rabbits as a scourge, a perpetual motion of mastication, indifferent to the human alterations that were blowing away.


Rabbit drive in the Antelope Valley, California, 1910.

"BIG RABBIT DRIVE SUNDAY—BRING CLUBS"

 

In the pages of the Texan, John McCarty thought it was time to get rid of the big-eared menaces. People gathered in a fenced field at the edge of Dalhart, about two thousand folks armed with baseball bats and clubs. The atmosphere was festive, many people drinking corn whiskey from jugs. At last, they were about to do something, striking a blow against this run of freakish nature. They spread to the edge of the fenced section, forming a perimeter, then moved toward the center, herding rabbits inward to a staked enclosure.

As the human noose tightened, rabbits hopped around madly, sniffing the air, stumbling over each other. The clubs smashed heads. The bats crushed rib cages. Blood splattered, teeth were knocked out, hair was matted and reddened. The rabbits panicked, screamed. It took most of an afternoon to crush several thousand rabbits. Their bodies were left in a bloodied heap at the center of the field. Somebody strung up a few hundred of them and took a picture.

 

The rabbit drives caught on and became a weekly event in some places. In a single square mile section, people could kill up to six thousand rabbits in an afternoon. It seemed a shame to let all those dead rabbits go to waste when so many people were hungry in the cities. After one drive, in Hooker, Oklahoma, people shipped off two thousand rabbits as surplus meat. But it was hard to keep the meat from spoiling, and the logistics of butchering them proved too much. The rabbits were left to buzzards and insects or shoveled into pits and buried.

Jack Rabbit Hunt Near Hoxie, Kansas, ~1910. Click to enlarge and read sign.

• Related Post:
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  ** Killing Bison to Kill Off the Native Population
  ** Enter Immigrants, Cattle, Wheat and Dust
  ** When Jack Rabbits Became Scapegoats
  ** Time Magazine Puts a Bird Dog on the Cover
  ** When "Death Squads for Cattle" Saved America

Go-to-Ground Lurcher and Hawk

A nice little video from T.S. Wright showing Cog, the Hybrid Falcon, and Loki the Lurcher digging a Jackrabbit out of a hole after a long flight.  

This is real four-species interaction, and real three-species partnership!

Jack Rabbits are actually a type of hare and do not den underground (neither do Cottontail rabbits), but will bolt into a hole if chased in hot pursuit.   I am not sure what made the original hole, but given the area, it would have to be badger, fox or prairie dog I would think.

• Related Links:
  ** Jack Rabbit Hunt, Mead, Kansas ~1912
  ** Harris Hawk X Golden Eagle
  ** American Jack Rabbit History. 

Watch These Rabbits Do Agility!

This exhibit is from the Netherlands Denmark. Pretty darn impressive!
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The Battle Between Fur and Feather

"Maladaptive".

It's one of my favorite words, as it explains why most predators are so cautious in the wild, and why so many prey species appear to be so lucky.

To be too bold or too aggressive is to be maladaptive. "Too bold is soon cold."

A predator cannot afford damage to muscle, joint, bone, tooth, wing, or talon.

And yet a predator cannot afford to be slow, and cannot always be cautious. At some point is has to eat.

And so the great game begins.

Every flight or run holds within it the possibility of great tragedy -- a torn cruciate ligament, a ripped claw, a shattered beak, a lost eye.

Is it any wonder that lions, tigers, and bears are generally so cautious around men? Most of the time, we represent the unknown, and the unknown always represents the chance of great harm.

It does not take much to undo a top predator. And yes, they somehow know that.

• Related Links:
  ** Maladaptive Is a Two-Way Street
  ** Maladaptive Pigeons at the Hand of Man
  ** An Unintended Lesson About Charles Darwin
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American Jack Rabbit History

A repost from this blog circa February 2006.

A Jack Rabbit is not a rabbit -- it is a hare. The name comes from the fact that early settlers distinguished this animal from the various forms of cotton tail rabbits by comparing the ears of this hare to that of a jack ass. A "jack ass rabbit" became, in time, a "jack rabbit".

American jack rabbits come in two basic flavors -- white-tailed jack rabbits and black-tailed jack rabbits. There is also the snowshoe hare, but it is uncommon in the U.S. which is the southern terminus of its range.

Jack rabbits are so common in much of the drier parts of the American west that in most states the law says you can kill as many as you want, any way you want, on your own property.

Long gunners kill about 2 million jack rabbits in California every year, and the numbers are not in decline as a consequence. Kills by coursing dogs, such as greyhounds, are so rare they do not even register in the statistics.

Truth be told, it is hard to make a dent on jack rabbit populations because they are as prolific as .... well rabbits. Female jack rabbits breed for about half the year (January to July) and have 3 or 4 litters a year with three or four young on average. Gestation is 41 to 47 days, and the young are born alive and running, straight out of the box -- there is no den or nest.

The white-tailed jack rabbit is about 8 pounds and a bit larger than its black-tailed cousin. Fox eat almost no jack rabbits (too big and fast for a fox to catch), but coyotes take quite a few. The main enemy of the jack rabbit is tularemia -- an ugly little disease, and not a very nice way to die.

Jack rabbit hunts are an old tradition in the American West. Hunting them with dogs, however, is certainly less efficient and more sporting than the way it once was done!

The old-fashioned American jack rabbit hunts that occurred in the West were done with snow fencing that would stretch out for a mile or two in a large funnel. Rabbits would then be driven into the funnel and the rabbits would then be penned at the end of the funnel and clubbed to death.



The picture above is of an 1893 Fresno, California bunny roundup with snow fence used as a "boma" to corral the rabbits.


Some jack rabbits were eaten, but the real reason for the jack rabbit roundup was that 15 jack rabbits could supposedly eat about as much as a cow, and while there was a market for cattle hide and salted beef, there was no market for jack rabbit.

Jack rabbit roundups in the American west were not hunting -- they were a failed attempt at extermination.


1894 jack rabbit haul from Lamar, Colorado.


The first greyhound coursing clubs in the U.S. were a product of the massive rabbit drives pictured above. The healthiest rabbits taken in a jack rabbit drive were sold to coursing clubs (some are far away as Florida!). Today, the live rabbits that were once used in open fields, have been replaced with race tracks in which a mechanical bunny runs down an elevated track. In less formal "lure coursing" trials, a plastic bag is tied to a moving string run across a motor fly wheel and pulleys.


20,000 rabbits taken in one Fresno, Califonira Jack Rabbit roundup, 1893


Around the turn of the 20th Century, the federal government put most of the American West in control of the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, various Indian reservations, and the military. Federal protection of these environmentally marginal lands has meant that jack rabbits have been allowed to breed unfettered by cattlemen for about 100 years now. The cow at McDonald's is probably a feed-lot animal, not a free-range western cow competing head-to-head with jack rabbits. In short, the jack rabbit has never had it so good.

A few greyhounds are still used to course jack rabbits in the West, but they are not much of a threat to jack rabbit populations. The reason for that is pretty simple: A jack rabbit can hit speeds of 40-45 mph and turn on a dime. The few rabbits that are caught are easily replaced through natural reproduction.

In fact, getting chopped by a greyhound may be the best of all possible exits for a jack rabbit. The alternative death is not a hospital bed with a morphine drip and soft music in the background, but debilitating disease, vehicle impact, starvation, or being ripped apart by a coyote, owl, and/or the blast of a shotgun or a .22 rifle. In the litany of ways a rabbit can die, a chop by a practiced greyhound is a good way to go.
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Fantasy Creatures and Halloween

This post is recycled from 2004.

People seem to have a need for fantasy. I have written in the past about "fantasty diggers" but perhaps something should be said about fantasy creatures as well.

There is the fellow who claims to be an expert in wildlife who says he hunts blue fox, which he describes as a cross between a red fox and a Gray fox. That would be a fascinating cross (!) as these two animals are not remotely related to each other and cannot mate (nor do they wish to).

The same fellow chimed in that American rabbits den underground and that there are rabbit warrens in America. In fact no American rabbit dens underground. All of our native rabbits are cottontails (which is a genus, not a species) or hares and they nest in the shallowest of scrapes in the dirt. The pygmy rabbit, which lived in a small section of the West and was no bigger than a rat, was the one exception, but it is now believed to be extinct in the wild.

America runs rife with fantasy animals. There is Big Foot and Sasquatch, but also the Chupacabra, the Mothmen of Ohio, the Ozark Howler, various types of vampire dogs and Werewoves, and "Chessie" the Lake Champlain version of the Loch Ness Monster.

The U.K. has the same phenomenon, where loose, sem-feral lurchers and sheep-worrying dogs are described as the "Beast of Bonndwyyn" or some other interesting-sounding place.

Tracks are carefully photographed, and the brave locals point to the big claw marks as proof that a large feral cat (a black panther or jaguar or American cougar) is running loose in the allotmments.

In fact, the claw marks are proof that it is not a big cat -- all cats except cheetahs retract their claws when walking or running. If you see claw marks in a track, you have a dog. A dog that looks a lot like a large wild cat is most probably a lurcher. There may be a few feral swamp cats in the UK (as well as Scottish wild cats) but if you have ever seen one of either species, you will not worry about much livestock being lost -- both are hardly bigger than a large house cat.

Tonight, when you see monsters running through your streets, try to remember it's Halloween, and not Chupacabra hunting season. Fantasy is a fine thing -- so long as it's not confused with reality.

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Ferret Locators, Family Planning and Polecat Chow

A rabbit hole in the U.K. is netted.

In Great Britain, rabbit hunting with ferrets has never been easier as this 1998 article from The Independent makes clear.

Within the last 10 years ... three innovations - one technical, one medical, and one nutritional - have radically transformed ferret-keeping in Britain.

The technical innovation is the invention of the electronic ferret locator. This is a device about the size of a box of cooking matches, which picks up signals from a tiny transmitter attached to the ferret's collar, thus enabling the ferreter to locate and dig out a working ferret should it "lie up".

In the past, the dreaded "lie up" was the bane of the ferreter's life. A lie up is when a ferret is put down a rabbit hole, and after running up and down for a bit, and perhaps killing and partially eating a rabbit, she simply curls up and goes to sleep. Like all carnivorous predators, ferrets are big sleepers, especially after a meal.

Before the invention of the locator, the ferreter faced with a laid-up ferret had several options - all of them incredibly time- consuming. One was to put his head as far down the rabbit hole as possible and try calling his ferret out. A potentially embarrassing method this, if attempted on or near a public right of way. Another was to paunch a rabbit and try to entice the ferret to the surface with the smell of rabbit's innards. And failing these, the ferreter had to nip home and get his nastiest, most anti-social hob ferret, tie a length of string to it, and send it down the hole to give the sleeping ferret a wake-up call.

And failing that, the ferreter had to sit there all night, or until the ferret decided to come out of its own accord. It has been argued that over the years the "lie up" has contributed more to the countryman's reputation for surliness than anything else.

But these days all a ferreter with pounds 69. 50 to spend on a ferret locator has to do is wave it about until it picks up the signal, turn the dial until he gets a depth reading in feet, then dig down to the ferret, trying not to decapitate it with the spade as he gets in close. No fuss, no mess, no time wasted. The improvement in the quality of life of the average locator-owning ferreter has been immeasurable. If, for example, a ferret lies up just as the ferreter is thinking about packing up for the day (normally enough to induce apoplexy in all but the most phlegmatic of ferreters in the bad old pre-locator days), with any luck our man can locate his ferret, dig it out, fold his nets, paunch his rabbits, whittle a stick, and still be back at the caravan in time for the first reading of the football results.

One might have imagined that new-fangled electrickery such as this would be slow to catch on with country people practising a hunting technique unchanged from that depicted by early medieval tapestries. Not so. Once they were in the shops, news of the ferret locators spread through country districts like myxomatosis. And elderly ferreters who had never before set foot inside a pet shop were queuing on the step to buy one. In no time at all, the popularity of the little-understood ferret locator made it the countryman's equivalent of the mobile phone.

The second innovation to revolutionise ferret-keeping was the perfection of a surgical technique for vasectomising hobs (male ferrets). One of the many curiosities of the ferret is that unless the jill (female) is served by a hob once she has come into season, she may die. (When a jill is in season, her vulva swells up like a football, so this should be fairly obvious, even to a novice ferret-keeper.)

In effect this meant that ferret jills were constantly producing litters, which needed to be fed, and if a litter came late in the year, the mother was temporarily unavailable for work. With two litters per year at, say, seven kittens per litter and a full-time ferreter only needing three or four hard-working ferrets, the majority of kits were surplus to requirement. Of course, rather than raise these unwanted litters, the normal practice was to knock the youngsters on the head - or "make sailors out of them", to use a country euphemism - maybe leaving two to suckle the milk.

But now that British veterinary practices are able and willing to vasectomise hob ferrets for as little as pounds 20 a time, everyone concerned is a lot better off than they were. The ferret-keeper's life has been simplified because he no longer has to anxiously study his jill's vaginas or commit infanticide; the jills are satis- fied; and once the vasectomised hob gets over the shock of the operation and finds himself being lent out all over the district, he can't believe his luck.

... The third, and in many ways the most crucial, advance in ferret welfare came four years ago, when a pet food company called James Wellbeloved began marketing a dry, "complete" ferret food. Ferrets require a high- protein diet, and this has meant that, in the past, ferret-keepers had to keep their charges supplied with meat, ideally in the form of paunched rabbits. But as ferrets will eat any meat, in any condition, no matter what the live animal has died of, they were given anything from butchers' offal to frozen day-old chicks to fallen livestock to long-dead road-casualty badgers. It wasn't that long ago that if you saw a car stopped in the middle of the road and the driver out and busily scraping a dead crow off the tarmac, you could put money on it that she or he was a ferret fancier trying to save themselves a few bob.

... Feeding decomposing flesh to ferrets is OK in the winter, but in summer the flies are terrible. On the whole, therefore, what with the imperative to feed ferrets on flesh, and the attendant flies, and the smells, and the reputation of the ferret as a psycho killer, ferret-keeping was never an attractive proposition for the squeamish, the fastidious, or anybody who wanted to remain on speaking terms with their immediate neighbours.

The advent of a dry, odourless, complete ferret food has changed everything. Suddenly ferrets are coming to live indoors as housepets. A damp draughty hutch as far away from the house as possible, with a week's droppings piled up in one corner, and a paunched rabbit slung in every once in a while, is now the exception rather than the rule.

• Related Post
  ** These Are the Good Old Days
  ** Rabbit Realities vs. Elmer Fudd & Watership Down

Sharing Death and Disease Across Species

A zoonotic disease is a disease that originates in wildlife and which has a reservoir in a wild population of animals, but which leaps the species barriers and can be transferred to humans.

Unlike diseases that reside only in humans, diseases that reside in both humans and wild animal populations are just about impossible to eradicate. The bad news is that there are a tremendous number of such diseases, and the number of them is growing every year.

Malaria -- an old zoonotic disease -- still kills 2 million people a year, while HIV/AIDS is a newer pathogen that has killed 25 million people so far, with another 55 million people (or more) infected worldwide.

The Bubonic plague is an old zoonotic disease, while a newer one is Mad Cow disease, to which can be added SARS, West Nile, and Ebola hemorrhagic fever.

When I was a kid there was no such thing as Lyme Disease in either humans or dogs, but now Lyme disease is one of the most commonly diagnosed diseases here in the Eastern United States.

Meanwhile, it seems a day cannot go by when a rabid fox or raccoon story does not appear in the press somewhere in the United States.

The total number of zoonotic diseases is unknown, but of the 1,415 known human pathogens in 2001, 62% were of zoonotic origin. A quick summary of the vectors for some of the more common zoonotic diseases:

• Bubonic Plague is caused by a bacterium transmitted to humans from black rat fleas. A possible epidemic of bubonic plague is described in the First Book of Samuel, and the so-called Black Death which emerged in the 14th century killed approximately one third of Europe's population. The prairie dog towns of the Western U.S. became infected with the bubonic plague after Chinese immigrants brought the disease to the U.S. after 1900.
  
  
• Rabies was described among hunting dogs in Mesopotamia as early as 2,300 BC, and accounts of the disease can be found in early Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman records. Any mammal can have rabies, but in the U.S. it is most common in feral cats, skunks, bats, fox and raccoons. That said, a groundhog was recently found in Pennsylvania with rabies.
  
  
• West Nile Virus is a kind of encephalitis and may have been what killed Alexander the Great, as crows were reported to have died at his feet. In 1999, West Nile virus was introduced into the US, thanks to the introduction of the tiger mosquito which came to the U.S. in a load of tires from Asia. West Nile now strikes rare birds in zoos (especially perching western hemisphere birds such as parrots, eagles, hawks and cormorants) as well as bird feeder birds, horses and humans. The disease is named after a section of Uganda where it was first found.
  
  
• Tularemia is transmitted by skin contact with an infested, diseased, or dead hare, rabbit or rodent.
  
  
• Hantavirus is spread from rodents to humans by aerosols composed of dust from rodent scat. It is rare, but a concern in the driest parts of the American southwest, especially after wet (or relatively wet) winters and springs.
  
  
• Salmonella is generally transmitted to humans through contaminated water reserves and can come from a wide variety of animals, but especially turtles and other reptiles and amphibians.
  
  
• Leptospirosis ("rat catcher's jaundice") is generally transmitted to humans who drink water into which a rat has urinated. It can also be transmitted to dogs, pigs and other farm stock.
  
  
• Rift Valley Fever is spread by mosquitoes, as is equine encephalitis, and Japanese encephalitis.
  
  
• Leishmania is spread by sand-flies.
  
  
• Typhimurium occurs endemically in wild birds, causing sporadic cases and small outbreaks in humans.
  
  
• Anthrax is primarily a disease of herbivores, but it can be transmitted from wildlife to humans by contaminated meat or water, or by the spread of spores by flies, vultures, and other scavengers.
  
  
• Lyme disease comes from ticks that feed on rodents and deer.
  
  
• Bovine Tuberculosis can be spread from cattle to humans, and frequently finds a refuge in badgers, possums, wild boar, feral pig, and deer.
  
  
• Echinococcosis comes from tapeworms, and moves easily from canids to humans. Fox are particularly susceptible to this parasite as small rodents are the intermediate host.
  
  
• Monkeypox is a disease caused by a pox virus that typically occurs in Africa where the African squirrel is the natural host. The disease now occurs among prairie dogs in the United States, thanks to the importation of African rodents for the pet trade.
  
  
• Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is a viral respiratory illness that is believed to have originated in palm civet cats, raccoon dogs, and rats. It has not yet shown up in wild animal populations in the U.S.
  
  
• Influenza (the flu) has been reported in a variety of animal species, including birds, humans, pigs, horses, and sea mammals, but its main reservoir seems to be wild waterfowl, especially ducks.
  
  
• AIDS is caused by the HIV virus, which appears to be a variety of Simian Immune-Virus (SIV) which may have spread to humans from nonhuman primates in West Africa -- perhaps due to consumption of meat, or infection from monkey blood during slaughter.
  
  
• The common cold is a virus that scientists now believe originated in horses.

Humans are not the only species impacted by emerging diseases leaping the species barrier.

Black-footed ferrets have been decimated by distemper that has crossed over from wild dog populations, as have seals and sea lions.

Frogs and many other amphibians around the globe have been decimated by diseases brought into new habitats -- often by scientists coming to study the creatures.

Lowland gorilla populations are being hammered by Ebola hemorrhagic fever, while elk and deer in the western U.S. are falling to chronic wasting disease very similar to Mad Cow disease.

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Coffee and Provocation

How do You Spell Coccidiosis?
The Wall Street Journal reports that some feline owners are fearful of professionally processed cat foods made by big companies that actually have quality control personnel and bank accounts large enough to go after. Their solution is to buy fresh rabbit carcasses that have been ground up whole -- guts, brain, bone, fur and all. Good idea? Maybe not. Here's a tip: look up a few diseases like Cryptosporidium cuniculus, Giardia duodenalis, Toxoplasma gondii, Sarcocystis cuniculi and see if they have a relationship to rabbits and cats. Remember: there's a reason we cook food in restaurants, and why wild animals that eat raw meat are generally dead at age two or three. Eating raw animals (even domestic animals) is not a good idea. Fire was invented for a reason.

Attack of the Killer Water Weed:
The New York Times reports that Caddo Lake in Texas is being eaten alive by Salvina Molesta, a type of South American water weed "with an ability to double in size every two to four days and cover 40 square miles within three months, suffocating all life beneath." No problem there!

Pet Insurance:
With insurance, the big print always seems to provide coverage, but the little print always seems to limit that coverage or void it altogether. Now consider pet insurance. When a pet insurance company denies your claim or pays out only fragmentary coverage, your only option is to hire a $10,000 lawyer in order to litigate a $2,000 claim. Not likely. So what do you do? You pay the vet, walk away bruised, and the Pet Insurance company pockets your premums and laughs all the way to the bank. Don't believe that's what happens most of the time? Then read what people with pet insurance have to say. Has anyone ever had a good experience with pet insurance? If so, tell us in the comments section (and sign it!).

Giant Alien Crabs:
Check out this picture and story over at Tom James Virginia Outdoors. Yow! Just what the Cheseapeake Bay needs -- more alien invaders.

Advice from a Mad Man:
Over at the Black Bear Blog, Tom Remington has sage advice from a mad man in Oklahoma who wrestles live coyotes: “If a coyote bites down" on you this gentleman says, “Don’t panic.” If you jerk your hand back, the coyote’s teeth will rip flesh off the bone. The thing to do is to calmly dig your fingernail into the soft roof of the coyote’s mouth. “When it lets go, grab it by the throat and yank it up. “When you get all four legs off the ground, the fight is over. You’ve won.”

Louisiana Hawking Blog Kicks Up Again:
Good news on the blog-o-sphere: Matt M. is cranking up his hawking blog again. Excellent!

Best Environmental News of the Month:
Sen. Ted Stevens's home has been raided by FBI and IRS agents looking into corruption. Corruption? No! Just because he has pimped out America's wild lands to the oil and gas lobbies, for more than 30 years? Why would you think there might be corruption there? Anyone who thinks getting a warrant for the most powerful U.S. Senator on Capitol Hill (who is also a Republican) does not know how it goes in this town. And yes, he could be as innocent as O.J.

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Coffee and Provocation

A Bucket of T-Rex Please:
The New York Times and other sources report that chickens are descended from T-Rex. Well actually, the truer story is that all birds are descended from dinosaurs. Hmmmm. So they didn't all die out with the meteor crash?

Are Breed Restrictions Code Talk?:
The Bluedogstate blog asks whether breed-specific bans, and pit bull bans in particular, are the new "code talk" for keeping blacks and poor folks down and out? In the era of Imus, that's not crazy talk, and there are some good points scored here. That said, I am not always thrilled by some of the numbskulls who own pit bulls. One can admit there is a problem without necessarily embracing the solutions offered by know-nothing politicians.

Manatees are Doing Well:
More evidence that the Endangered Species Act works: US Fish and Wildlife Service officials are considering reclassifying the manatee as threatened instead of endangered, a sign that the numbers are up a bit thanks to motorboat and development restrictions. And, yes, manatees will still be under Federal protection.

Bite Sized Snacks Released to Wild:
Twenty endangered Columbia Basin pygmy rabbits, Brachylagus idahoensis, were reintroduced to the wilds of Washington state just three weeks ago, but 14 of them have already been eaten by coyotes, hawks and owls. These little rabbits are the only burrowing rabbits in this hemisphere, weigh just 1 pound, and their wild population got so depleted a decade or so ago that they were all rounded up and put into a captive breeding program to ensure their survival. One has to wonder how retarded the scientists were to not do basic predator abatement at the reintroduction site.

Wired Monks Gone to the Dogs:
The Monks at the New Skete monastery are the stars of the new Animal Planet series "Divine Canine: With the Monks of New Skete" which premiers on Monday. I hope the brothers will explain why they stay away from AKC dogs and always import breeding stock. See Inbred Thinking on how the AKC's closed registry system wrecks dogs.

Wild and Working Dogs on PBS:
PBS channels will be showing "Dogs That Changed the World" on April 22 and 29. The series promises to offer a broad look at dogs and the human-dog relationship and features a round-robin of clips "from the jungle to the arctic" of dogs hunting, herding, guarding, pulling, and guiding. Again, we can only hope the series explores a little bit of the Inbred Thinking that undermines dogs today.

Animal Planet Plays Catch Up to Cesar Milan:
Animal Planet is trying to play catch up with Cesar Milan with their new series "It's Me or the Dog" where Briton Victoria Stillwell tries to sort out dysfunctional pets and people. The series starts Monday. Once again, it seems only people with accents can train American dogs and owners. Walkies anyone?

Wolf-Man, Dog-Man or Idiot?:
Once again we have a Briton, but this time it's Shaun Ellis who took in three abandoned wolf pups (from where?) and decided he was just the guy to raise them up in a big zoo-cage enclosure in order to teach them how to be a wolf. Apparently long hair and a disdain for a bath is all you need to do the job. It was all filmed for the National Geographic Channel series "A Man Among Wolves," and shot "on location" at the 25-acre (is that all?) Combe-Martin Wildlife and Dinosaur Park in Devon. Call of the wild indeed!

Spring Thanksgiving:
Spring turkey season starts this week in most places -- be careful out there. Meanwhile, let's give thanks for what the National Wild Turkey Federation has helped give us. .

Whippet Good

Matt Mullenix and Rina the Whippet, with Rina's first brace of rabbits. The title to this post was stolen from an email from Matt -- a reference to an old Devo song.

One of the unplanned benefits of this blog is that I have met, online, some pretty cool people who, though they may hunt differently than I do, share the same three- and four-species trials, tribulations and thrills of making it all work in the field while hunting.

Along with the folks that hunt with ferrets are the long-doggers and, perhaps most interesting of all, the hawkers and falconers. This last group is, without a doubt, the most literate group of complex-primitive hunters.

The picture, above, is of Matthew Mullenix and his young whippet Rina. There was a hawk in this hunt, of course, but as Matt explains it (quoting Gregg Barrow, another online friend), "The first season belongs to the dog," and these rabbits are purely Rina's.

The first season, of course, refers to the dog's first season -- not the hawk's or the human's. Matt's well-written and insightful journal this season is more about Rina the whippet (at least so far) than his veteran hawk Smash.

It was on Matt's blog that I learned that his old bird, Charlie, is now in stud at the Coulson's down in Louisiana (Tom and Jennifer Coulson are Harris Hawk breeders, fliers and mentors par excellence) and that Charlie had sired the new Harris Hawk that digger and hawker Teddy Moritz is now flying in New Jersey. A small universe, eh? Teddy's new hawk nailed its first bunny back in mid-October -- a development I learned on Matt's blog.

Matt took a long hawking swing around America recently. To read a little about his visit at Steve Bodio's, see the Querencia blog where he and Reid Farmer also blog with Steve.

Steve Bodio and Reid Farmer are another pair of interesting writers I stumbled upon due to this blog -- the kind of people who write about Turkish pigeons (No Dear, not Turkish prisons, Turkish pigeons), and the commonalities found among petroglyphs across the world. Three voices and three interests make for a rich gumbo at Querencia -- with occassional dashes of good stuff from other bloggers, naturalists, hawkers and doggers to spice it all up.

OK, back to dogs -- specifically hawking dogs.

I observe that a very rich and diverse variety of canines are found in the hawking world, and that the choice of dog may have less to do with the hawk than with the countryside being hawked and the collateral game than can be had in non-hawking seasons.

Teddy Mortiz, for example, hawks under a small pack of long-coated miniature dachshunds -- dogs that are useful for busting rabbits out of the tight thick stands of multiflora rose that are found in the East, but which also do double dirt dog duty on groundhog, fox, raccoon and possum.

Steven Bodio, who lives on one of the high flat stretches of upland New Mexico, has a love affair with the type of Turkish long-dog know as a Tazi -- a function of the jack rabbits, coyotes, and vast open spaces he has in his neck of the woods.

Hawker Rebecca O'Connor recently acquired a nice red Brittany. Her first Brittany was so well acclimated it licked the Falcon on the face and the bird actually tolerated it. A small all-pupose bird dog, Brittany's do well in a wide variety of cover -- a good all-rounder for California.

In other parts of the country, Jack Russells and beagles are popular for busting bunnies out of brush, while down in Louisiana, Matt has a fondness for whippets which are good warm-weather dogs for swamp rabbits and cotton rats as well as for busting birds out of tall tropical grasses.

For more on the subject, see >> Rabbit Hawker's Dogs.




A young male Harris Hawk and a longhaired dachshund named Fitz (as in Fitz-in-dens) which has an 11 inch inch chest, both owned and hunted by Teddy Moritz. The young tiercel Harris has been doing the business on eastern cotton tails.

Giant Rabbit

The BBC reports:

Herman Could Be 'Biggest Bunny'

A man has been showing off his gigantic rabbit named Herman.

The mighty bunny weighs a massive 7.7kg, and his ears are a lengthy 21cm - almost as long as most pet rabbits are tall. And he is almost 1m tall.

The German Giant is even big for his breed, which usually tip the scales at around 6kg.

Herman lives in a specially built solid oak hutch and chomps his way through just over 2kg of food a day. His owner says his favourite snack is lettuce.

The giant bunny, who lives in Berlin with owner Hans Wagner, also takes a vitamin supplement to keep him healthy, and munches through a bale of hay a week.

Bred big

Herman could be the world's biggest rabbit, but Guinness World Records have stopped accepting entries because of fears people were over-feeding their pets.

German Giants do not exist in the wild, and have been developed by breeders.

They can live for as long as 12 years.

Anti-Coursing Law Falls to Common Sense

Coursing rabbits, 1924.

Some time last year, somone in a coursing club in California decided he would get a little publicity for his club. Or perhaps he was called by ABC-television and was too naive to turn down the request.

Whatever the case, a reporter and camera crew were invited to a rabbit hunt in the California scrub, and the reporter used that footage to produce a "shocking segment" on jack rabbit hunting with greyhounds, complete with footage of a few dogs catching a rabbit or two in mid-stride.

The reporter, of course, left everything out that would have grounded the piece in the real world.

The piece failed to mention that jack rabbits are considered an agricultural pest in Calfornia, and that the state publishes advice on how to shoot, trap and poison them on farm land.

The reporter never mentioned that coursing rabbits is sufficiently rare in the U.S. that only about a dozen people showed up at the event. Some of these people had come from as far away as Canada and Washington state.

The reporter failed to mention that this type of hunting is not much different than using dogs to point birds or squirrels, except that the animal is not killed by a shotgun blast, but by a quick chop from a greyhound who returns the dead rabbit to hand.

The piece failed to mention that scores of thousands of coyotes "course" jack rabbits every day, and that rabbits are a prey species that breeds rapidly, and is found in record numbers across much of the West.

The reporter failed to mention how many shattered roadkill jack rabbits he passed on the highway (and ignored) while making this piece, or how many jack rabbits are devoured every year by bobcat, mountain lion, fox, hawk and eagle.

In the air-conditioned offices of ABC-TV, wild animals die in hospital infirmaries with a morphine drip, while dog food and T-bone steaks come direct from God, prepackaged and with a Universal Product Code printed on the side.

The quick death offered by the greyhound is never compared with death of tularemia -- the disease that routinely sweeps through American rabbit populations, and is a primary density-control regulator.

Television producers have never even heard of tularemia. In fact, they know nothing about jack rabbits at all (hint: they are not a rabbit), nor do they much care. The goal of a lazy reporter in TV Land is not to tell the truth -- it's a quick and "shocking" video to wrap around the advertisements which generate the station revenue.

"Breath deep the ether, little children, tonight the Koolaid is free." All you have to do is see a few ads for tampons, Miracle Mops, beer, and Viagra.

Back in January, I wrote about the history of jack rabbit eradication campaigns in California. Of course this kind of history was not mentioned by ABC-TV. My God, if we start talking about what Grandpa did to control rabbits, greyhound coursing will seem tame!

As sure as swallows return to Capistrano, of course, an opportunistic politician will follow behind "shocking footage". In this case the smug reporter and a Berkley assemblywoman (a true weepy-eyed bunny-hugger) were in clear cahoots. Slam-bang, legislation to end rabbit hunting with greyhounds was introduced in the California legislature.

The good news is that stupid does not always sell, even in California. This particular bit of legislation did not even make it out of committee.

It seems proponents of the law failed to mention that enforcement of laws costs money, and that a new hunting law would require rules and regulations to be written up, web sites updated, brochures produced, and statistics collected. Even as staff time and resources went down this "rabbit hole" of waste, hunting license revenue would be lost, and opportunities to address real natural resource needs would go unaddressed.

The bottom line: this was going to be the most expensive "rabbit rescue" in the history of the world!

And this was even before the litigation was filed to challenge the law -- litigation to which every hunting dog owner in America would have been asked to contribute.

And, of course, all of this nonsense was entirely pointless, because no law can avoid rabbit death. Even in the best of times, adult jack rabbit mortality is around 75 perent per year. The state legislature cannot save a jack rabbit from California's growing population of coyotes, bobcats, cougars, hawks and eagles.

Nor can the state legislature save a single jack rabbit from a Lincoln Mercury. It is an inconvenient truth that cars kill 1,000 times more jack rabbits in California than greyhounds -- to say nothing of the legal shooting of jack rabbits (over 2,000,000 jack rabbits a year are legally shot in California alone), and the occassional abatement poisoning and trapping that occurs on some agricultural lands.

Of all the ways for a rabbit to die, in fact, death by a swift greyhound may be the very best. Not only is it quicker than tularemia, pseudotuberculosis, or toxoplasma, it is more humane and assured than death by gun or automobile tire. It is no worse a death than by mountain lion or coyote, and decidedly better than death by hawk or eagle.

It is not nearly as permanent as death by tract house -- almost nothing can come back from that!

And so, a silly law died under the crushing weight of common sense. For a brief shining moment, logic and nature Herself triumphed.

And so too, in an odd way, did the jack rabbit.

Mad Scientists Lose Funding for Fox Extinction

Back in August of 2004, I posted a piece ("The End of the Game") on something called viral immunocontraception. The basic thrust of this Australian mad-scientist scheme was to create a virus to sterilize entire populations of animals: fox, rabbits, people, mice, rats, carp, etc.

The chance for such a thing to run out of control and end "Life on Earth as We Know It"seems pretty obvious ... but apparently not to a small cadre of Australian scientists warmly embraced by Animal Right lunatics willing to risk killing off everything on Earth in order to prevent hunters from firing a shot.

The good news is that the the main groups of scientists working in this arena have lost their funding after 10 years of no subsantive progress in the field.

A news story, from the Australian media, is appended below:

Fox Free to Breed Like Rabbits

Australian scientists have abandoned attempts to develop a contraceptive vaccine for rabbits and foxes, saying the approach has failed to produce results after 10 years.

Dr Tony Peacock, chief executive officer of the Invasive Animals CRC, formerly the Pest Animal Control CRC, says resistance to genetic modification from the grazing industry has also influenced the decision to scale back the contraception work.

Hopes had been high for the success of a contraceptive vaccine delivered via the myxoma virus for rabbits and via non-toxic bait for foxes.

But Peacock says the rebadged CRC is changing tack on controlling the European rabbit and the European red fox, among Australia's worst pests.

"There are major changes in those two programs because the immunocontracepive work we've been doing for a decade in those species we can't take any further at the moment," he says.

"We couldn't make it work well enough to justify the millions and millions of dollars we'd have to spend to keep going [and] the grazing industries are very nervous about proceeding with the GM approach, and our work is genetic modification."

While the rabbit project will be scaled back from a "full-on development", he says basic research into the rabbit reproductive system will continue at the CRC.

The CRC also intends to press ahead with efforts to develop a contraceptive approach to mouse control, which has proved more effective and is better accepted by the grains industry, Peacock says.

Some smaller groups will continue to study contraceptive methods of pest control, he says.

New focus

Peacock says the focus will move back to the rabbit calicivirus, introduced in 1995, and new, improved fox baiting.

"We think the lethal [fox baiting] approach has some advantages and we can deliver it more quickly," he says.

Meanwhile, calicivirus has been effective in some parts of the country but has failed to make a real dent in others, and the CRC wants to see how its effects can become more uniform.

Peacock says feral rabbits and foxes remain an "enormous" problem and admits researchers are still scratching their heads for a solution.

"What we would advocate is, if it's possible to look at a biological control we should pursue it," he says.

"But it's long term research and it's only happened twice in the world, twice in Australia, twice on the rabbit."

Funding row

But all the CRC's new plans could be derailed by a funding row that Peacock says is threatening the organisation's future.

He says one of the CRC's partners, the Murray-Darling Basin Commission, is considering pulling out of an agreement to provide A$10.5 million because of a dispute with the New South Wales government.

If the commission decides to pull out of the CRC it would directly affect the so-called daughterless carp program and potentially affect all other aspects of the CRC.

A spokesperson says commissioners will meet in Queensland next Tuesday to make a decision.

"They agreed to put in A$10 million and now they're reconsidering it to anywhere between ten and zero," Peacock says.

"If we lose a big chunk of money then the committee that recommended the CRC [for funding] needs to reassess it."