160 year battle against one of Australia's worst invasives 🐇 | Meet the Ferals Ep 6 | ABC Australia

[Music] rabbits for nearly two centuries Australia has been waging a war against these small nocturnal vegetarians these lands department teams are working in complete unison with the farmers of the district and if doing so play an important part in this all-out war on the rabbit we've poisoned them on the ground and from the air the poisoned bases loaded onto an aircraft one of eleven that's being used in the campaign the base will be dropped on inaccessible areas their underground homes have been exploded and bulldozed and we've infected them with deadly viruses still they remain our most widespread and destructive pests inhabiting around 70% of the continent impacting on more than 300 species of native plants and animals and costing more than 200 million dollars every year in lost production domesticated rabbits arrived with the first fleet but pioneer pastoralists Thomas Austin is blamed for introducing wild rabbits in 1859 he shipped 24 of them from England for hunting on his property Barwon Park needs along releasing the rabbits on Christmas Day and we shall go out and hopefully shoot them all guess he was doing it seems like a good idea at the time he was doing what he thought was right and up until the end I mean rebus had been here since 1788 they'd they'd never really taken off so here's worries we're probably all these rabbits cannot survive more than survived they thrived in 1866 more than 14,000 rabbits were bagged during one of Austin's regular hunts so in just seven years 24 rabbits had become more than 14,000 here at Barwon Park Austin's home and local land holders were beginning to complain bitterly that rabbits were taking over their pastoral properties and eating their crops [Music] by the 1870s landowners across western Victoria and parts of South Australia were building large and long dry stone walls to keep the rabbits out building a wall it was rabbit proof was quite an exercise because I had to dig down so the rabbits couldn't easily burrow under it how successful was that rabbit wall do you think not really I don't think the rabbits would have simply gone around the Stoney Rises or they spread right throughout Australia soon after in the early 1900's the rabbit proof fence was constructed in Western Australia it was the longest unbroken fence in the world at the time as the Great Depression hit rabbit shooting became a national pastime providing valuable food up to a million rabbits a year were killed for canning tins were sent to servicemen fighting world wars imagine what it must have been like for some poor young digger from up some of the bad rabbit country in the Mallee he was sitting in the trenches over there and and he's handed a tin of canned rabbit I think that would have been the last straw the determination to destroy was as relentless as it was futile with rabbits able to produce seven litters a year they were in plague proportions by the middle of last century their voracious appetites diluting the landscape causing erosion loss of habitat for unique native animals and forcing farmers off their land the 1950s saw the first of the biological controls myxomatosis was as ugly as it was effective within three years of its release in 1950 90% of australia's rabbit population had been decimated by the 1980s mixto was losing its potency and flees from Spain were introduced to help spread the disease across the hot inland well I've had a lot of requests from station owners in the northern areas for rabbit fleas to release dr. Brian Cook later turned his mind to the next biological tool the khaleesi virus as it was then known was trialed on South Australia's watering Island but it unexpectedly found its way to the mainland it obviously comes to that point eventually that we asked the question of whether we should be trying to contain it or whether we we simply turn around and make the most out of it the scientists it was an embarrassment for farmers it was a godsend and I remember story of a felony hunter driving his truck backwards and forwards over a dead rabbit and then driving 50 kilometres after the road to his property a year after the escape the callous virus was formally released Thakur inga station near Broken Hill has borne witness to the rise and fall of rabbit numbers I first visited this property in 1995 the fifth generation to farm here at David Lord was exasperated at the rabbit damage within weeks of recording this interview khaleesi virus swept through well here we are a year later David since then the RCD khaleesi virus has gone through your property now this is an active Warren has our city worked absolutely yes there's up to five you know we've seen five rabbits here there would be between 30 and 50 otherwise landline continued to check in on Thacker inga so it's five years ICD went through your property yeah what are we seeing here we're seeing the Warren vegetating over with this copper burr which is pretty typical of around the property there is evidence of the odd rabbit here and striding up as a dead one here David Lord ripped more than 28-thousand Warren's to capitalize on the viral opportunity and 24 years after that first visit I returned to the outback sheep and cattle station this is the war room where we found the first RC rabbit the died of RCD in 1995 the first confirmed case it's a lot more vegetation than I remember yeah it's huge we were losing 28 tons of vegetation per day [Music] the landscape of windswept Macquarie Island is so different from the sunburned plains of inland Australia but the Khaleesi virus along with the use of specially trained dogs has had a profound impact on the ecology I think it's incredible I came down here in 2010 and I could see rabbits on the hillsides and a lot of the damage and now we're still seeing rapid change with increasing tacit coverage on the hillsides little funky popping up all over the place insects and it's just going to keep going in 2015 the sub-antarctic heartland of Tasmania became the first jurisdiction in Australia to eradicate rabbits and of course the radication cannot be done by only one method so it was absolutely essential that the hunters in dog cam has followed up Robert in mainland Australia eradication will never happen but with the original Khaleesi virus losing its sting because rabbits have developed immunity the battle defined new viruses continues so we brought in 38 variants from Europe and from Asia and really assess those with the with the view of trying to select a new strain that was going to have more impact in the wetter cooler high production areas of Australia in 2017 the latest weapon was deployed it was a strain of the rabbit hemorrhagic disease referred to simply as k5 because it originated in Korea in a giant citizen science project virus laced carrots and green were released at more than 600 sites across the country yeah this there's certainly an awful lot of interest from the community to participate in the rollout and to provide us with information following the release spotlight counts helped determine whether it had done its job landline was at the CSIRO in Canberra when the first rabbit to have died from k5 was formally diagnosed as you can see the liver is very pale and yellowish and this discoloration is usually the tell-tale sign that this rabbit died from rabbit hemorrhagic disease but it became clear while the virus was knocking down about a third of the rabbits at release sites it wasn't spreading so there'll be people who are watching this who say they can still see loads of rabbits on their properties on the basis of that was it a success I still say yes to that because we've had two breeding seasons since their release a virus is never going to take out every last rabbit and rabbit as we know breed like rabbits so soon as there's one there's many K five is still available and can be distributed to reduce rabbits in specific locations I can see something running across the screen that's quite exciting and the work has already begun to find the next weapon in this never-ending battle against the bunny

Channel: ABC Australia

Views: 2,662,053

Rating: 4.5596108 out of 5

Keywords: ABC, Australia, Landline, Landline ABC, feral animals and pests in australia, feral animals introduced into australia, feral animals, wild rabbits australia, wild rabbits, rabbit pest control, rabbit pest, feral rabbits in australia, feral rabbits facts, rabbits eating, rabbit proof fence, rabbit hunting, wild rabbit hunting and cooking, wild rabbit hunting

Id: 778Da7NCF6s

Length: 10min 41sec (641 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/jwai86]

I dare say that a .22LR rifle is a more humane way to hunt rabbits than trying to beat them to death with big sticks...

[u/Michael-Fuble]

Note to self. Get A/B license and start hunting.

[u/Capt_Billy]

This whole series is pretty good