How do you control Rabbits (without shooting)?

[Gwolf]

The dingos are still the best bunny control. They can smell the rabbit nest, dig the young rabbits out and eat them. That interoupts the entire rabbit breeding cycle. Instead of just getting rid of one rabbit, they prevent a whole generation from reaching breeding age.

 

[Peter Aawen]

No Dingoes around here where we are in the Adelaide Hills any more, probably haven't been any for at least a century now - in fact, there's not too many left on the other side of the Dingo fence in South Oz either, but that's a loooong way North of here! Not too many feral dogs around these parts either, and virtually no cats, for the reasons mentioned in my earlier posts. All of the domestic dogs around are so sick of the bloody rabbits they can't even be bothered to bark at them any more, let alone chase them &/or eat them! And the majority of the Owls we still have living in the Hills are tiny, they're basically smaller than week old rabbit kits when the owls are fully grown, so they don't really have much, if any, impact on the rabbit numbers, mainly cos they tend to prefer to eat mice, small reptiles, &/or insects, but those numbers are dropping cos the rabbits have eaten all the food they live on! Plus, all the bigger 'birds of prey' are already so well fed &/or stuffed that they're almost beyond flying, while just about every female rabbit has another litter of maybe 7-12 rabbits every month and a bit, and generally, something well over half of each of those litters will start breeding themselves in about 7-8 weeks or so!! Think MASSIVELY EXPONENTIAL growth in the rabbit numbers, and you MIGHT start to get close to how rapidly the rabbit population is booming here - and even if we still had any real predator populations left (but we don't!) all of the 'natural predators' combined basically don't stand a chance of keeping up with the numbers of rabbits atm, let alone getting ahead of their population growth!

Mind you, when it comes to 'natural predators' for the rabbits these days, I'd suggest that the biggest impact on the adult rabbit population atm is the motor vehicle (hey, didja see what I did there?! Impact, from cars, huh?! ), and even cars only have an impact on the rabbits that are either too slow or too stupid to get off the bloody road when a car comes along... altho the rabbit numbers are beginning to get close to seeing rabbits being forced onto the roadways simply due to the numbers of the pesky things that are around!! They aren't yet quite so bad that cars are regularly skidding (or 'hydroplaning') on squished rabbits like they have in years past, but there's getting to be more on the roadways each day and I reckon it's only a matter of time. There's no longer too many drivers who'll even bother to TRY to dodge them, most just plow on thru!

The 'authorities' are telling us that at this time last year, we had record breaking numbers of rabbits around, apparently the greatest rabbit population we'd seen in the decades since the various disease controls were introduced; only this year already, because the season has been so much better for them/their breeding, there's plenty of vegetation for them to eat, and because the wild rabbit population at large is developing an increasing immunity to the various introduced diseases thru breeding with domesticated & vaccinated rabbits, producing immune litters that then go feral, the rabbit numbers are already well beyond last years numbers and the environmental conditions look like remaining ideal for their population to continue to boom for quite a few months &/or years to come!!

I've tried sprays and powders and cayenne pepper and pretty much everything else within reason that's been suggested here, but nothing has worked much beyond a day or so - and mixing it up, swapping and changing the method of choice frequently &/or regularly/irregularly doesn't work either, there's apparently enough rabbits around that've already become acquainted to or immune to each method that when all the others see them chowing down on anything green, they send out the word and within moments, hundreds descend upon my poor lawn en masse! BTW, that means not just 'tens' of rabbits, or even 'a hundred' rabbits, it means 'hundredS' of rabbits!! It seems that the only things that're likely to have any significant impact on their numbers now is if/when the rabbit population grows so large that they eat everything out and they start to starve; or we have another drought and all the vegetation dies off &/or gets eaten out!!

 

[Gwolf]

Eventually, Mother Nature will find a way to balance the system again, if you just wait and watch, but you really may not like what Mother Nature comes up with as a solution.

A possibility would be a specialized adaptation of what was originally the domestic house cat. Now some of the feral cats have already increased in size up over 30 pounds, and no longer showing any signs of ever being domesticated. With unlimited food supply and further adaptation Mother Nature may have an answer to the over-supply of rabbits, but the new predator might be a very fast, and very dangerous large cat never before seen. Humans created a nitch, left it open, and now it could be filled with something that would even hunt any dingos left after it eats all the free, and available rabbit protein. Look at the difference in dog breeds from tiny to huge just developed in a few thousand years by humans and imagine what Mother Nature can do with well fed and well armed cats.

On the other hand it could be something as small as a virus that humans had no input in the developement of or control of once it spreads. If it is put in motion by Mother Nature, there may not be any way to control which species it may affect in the end.

 

[Calimusjohn]

Has the local council considered holding a "Thomas Austin Day?" Mr. Austin imported rabbits from Europe in 1869. Perhaps they could pay a bounty on rabbits "harvested" on Austin's Day. Harp seals were decimated by men wielding clubs. Just trying to think outside the box. As pointed out, Mother Nature will eventually balance things out.

 

[Br549rick]

looks like someone needs to invent a sterility pill for these pesky rascals good luck.

 

[Gwolf]

looks like someone needs to invent a sterility pill for these pesky rascals good luck.

But who will catch them all and make them take the pill?

 

[Peter Aawen]

But who will catch them all and make them take the pill?

I dunno if there's any contraceptive that'd work quickly enough (except maybe a '.22 short' lead 'pill' travelling at juuust sub-sonic velocity - only that's definitely not allowed where we are now, in a 'town'! Bloody re-zoning! ), but I did 'catch' a few individual rabbits out of the hundreds that invaded my lawn last night - they were all a bit excitable on initial 'capture', then they rapidly calmed down and were no longer be in any condition to take any sort of 'pills' after I'd applied my fully approved and guaranteed effective 'manually applied rabbit calming technique'! At least THEY aren't going to be breeding any more of the pesky varmints!

I'm sure they'll eventually breed up in numbers enough that they eventually eat themselves into starvation, only by then, there won't be much greenery left around! They've already eaten the Linear Park bare for quite a way in each direction, and now have started ring-barking trees and eating all the leaves and branches they can reach, so it's probably only a matter of time before they start climbing the trees to get to the growing shoots - don't laugh, I've seen them do that before! While the rabbit plague is really pretty much a State-wide problem, there's a growing community push here to get the local council to do something more than they have so far, even talk of demanding 'controlled shooting' &/or far more aggressive baiting programs. We'll see, I guess - but I don't think it'll be soon enough to save my lawn!

 

[Gwolf]

I dunno if there's any contraceptive that'd work quickly enough (except maybe a '.22 short' lead 'pill' travelling at juuust sub-sonic velocity - only that's definitely not allowed where we are now, in a 'town'! Bloody re-zoning! ), but I did 'catch' a few individual rabbits out of the hundreds that invaded my lawn last night - they were all a bit excitable on initial 'capture', then they rapidly calmed down and were no longer be in any condition to take any sort of 'pills' after I'd applied my fully approved and guaranteed effective 'manually applied rabbit calming technique'! At least THEY aren't going to be breeding any more of the pesky varmints!

I'm sure they'll eventually breed up in numbers enough that they eventually eat themselves into starvation, only by then, there won't be much greenery left around! They've already eaten the Linear Park bare for quite a way in each direction, and now have started ring-barking trees and eating all the leaves and branches they can reach, so it's probably only a matter of time before they start climbing the trees to get to the growing shoots - don't laugh, I've seen them do that before! While the rabbit plague is really pretty much a State-wide problem, there's a growing community push here to get the local council to do something more than they have so far, even talk of demanding 'controlled shooting' &/or far more aggressive baiting programs. We'll see, I guess - but I don't think it'll be soon enough to save my lawn!

Rabbits are only fast for short bursts of speed. In a long run, about 40 yards or more, a person can run them down and catch them. It has to be in an open field where they have a long distance before they can get away. I can't do it now, but when I was young I could stop the tractor, jump off, and chase a rabbit down. That is why a dog can catch them. They tire out quickly and look for a place to hide. Once the rabbit knows you can run him down he will just lie still on the dirt. When you catch them, they sort of go into shock. They stop squeeling and act like they passed out. If you have enough open ground you can run any of them down if you are in good shape. They will gnaw on certain trees in winter even when they don't have out of control numbers. They will kill the younger fruit trees. Not that many rabbits around here, but we have to put chicken wire around young pear, plum, most any fruit trees. Once the trees get older and the bark gets thick and hard, they won't bother them anymore. We have to put chicken wire over greens in the winter garden too. Not just for rabbits, for the deer too. If there is plenty of other green grass or shrubbery around they don't eat the garden vegetables so much. In winter when the only green around is your winter garden of lettuce and greens, they will eat it all.

I am pretty sure that if the vegetation gets sparse enough, you could lure them into a trap. You would still have to dispose of them. With the numbers you have there, that would be like trying to sweep the sand off the beach.

Just something that might work, but I don't know if it could work on rabbits. in the southwest USA they are having problems with screw worms again. The screw worms were eradicated here once before in the 1950s, but they are migrating, probably riding into the new area on infected animals. The way the screw worms were eradicated before was the Department of Agriculture set traps and caught millions of them. somehow they sterilized the males with X-Ray radiation and released them back into the wild. The sterile males would breed with the females, but no eggs were produced. The entire screw worm population was eradicated in about 2 years. The Dept of Ag still keeps traps set for the flies that produce the screw worm larva and if they catch any they start a new sterilization process. I have no idea if that could work for rabbits like it does for insects.

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[Peter Aawen]

Maybe Mother Nature has stepped in... Just last week, I was dispatching up to a dozen of the pesky wascals each night by occasionally quietly easing open the front door and then taking a few quick steps before practicing 'humane cervical dislocation' on any that I could readily reach... usually one or two every time I stepped out! And even my small 'Assistance Dog' Buster has been 'assisting' with the rabbits, altho I reckon he scares more than he catches, cos he starts barking every time he sees them and then races out to chase them at every opportunity, and it seems they're just dying of fright when he gets close?! He does either 'catch' them when they skid out on the turns or he bowl them over, and either way, he grabs them and shakes them like buggery, but on at least some of them, he's not breaking their necks!?! On checking, they're definitely dead tho, but often without so much as a mark on them!

Still'n all, we weren't really having any noticeable impact on the rabbit numbers desecrating my lawn, and we've been seeing hundreds of them, from multiple generations, every bloody night! My quite small lawn is now a patchy mix of completely bare ground, rapidly growing pill heaps, and the odd bit of dead and dying 'barely still green' grass that's rapidly being eaten lower than the ground so quickly that I think it would've all been gone or damaged beyond repair within a matter of days, not even a week, except for the latest turn of events!!

Then the 'Severe Weather Warnings' Country-wide hit all the Weather Forecast Sites and broadcasts a few days ago, warning of impending masses of heavy rain, possible floods, severe thunder storms, and wild winds - all of which we've had here over the last couple of days and look like continuing to get for at least another week or more!! As a result, all our local creeks and rivers, where the rabbits tend to have the majority of their warrens, have all flooded, and are still running bankers!!

Now these 'creeks and rivers' aren't what you lot might normally expect of things bearing those names - usually, for 10 or 11 months of the year, if our 'creeks and rivers' aren't actually completely dry; or maybe just a series of loosely 'linked by a drain like depression' series of shallow and largely stagnant puddles; they at best have maybe a strip of barely moving water that's about 1 metre/3-ish foot wide and possibly as deep as 200 mm/8 or so inches... in patches often 100 metres/yards or so apart! So they're not really carrying a lot of water most of the time! But for the last couple of days, after the solid and fairly heavy rain, those very same 'usually mainly dry creeks and rivers' have been running absofreakinlutely FULL if not flooding out over the surrounding Linear Parklands!! They haven't topped any of the bridges or roads yet, but all the culverts and roadside drains are brimming, and the river beds themselves have been 6 to 10 metres wide, sometimes even as much as 20 metres wide (so 20-30 feet wide out to maybe 60 feet wide); and about 6 to 10 metres deep (again, about 20-30 feet deep)! And were it's broken the banks, we've had a few hundred metres (more than a few hundred yards) of water spreading out about 300 mm/1 foot or so deep across the eaten almost naked 'grass flats' and bushy areas that make up the Linear Park along the Creek beds for about 5km/3 miles or so thru the town, a veritable flood of epic proportions - and all of this land and the creek beds that're now under rapidly flowing water is where the majority of the bleedin' rabbits been living and breedin' like rabbits, but their bloated carcasses are now being caught in and often blocking the 'trash racks' down-stream, just before the water enters our 'water supply catchment reservoirs'!!

So now, the rabbit numbers have plummeted virtually overnight a couple of days back, and there's clearly a lot of erosion and a whole new set of problems heading this way; and of course, all this rain & water around the place now is going to mean that any rabbits that survive until the floods are over will very soon have a whole heap of fresh vegetation to feed on and set them off breeding the next generation/plague of rabbits, but at least the breeding numbers should be reduced significantly for a couple of months. Might be just enough time to rip out what's left of my lawn, repair the ground below it, and plant some 'munch proof' &/or possibly poisonous type ground cover instead!

Here's hoping - Fingers crossed!

 

[Little Blue]

My goodness, that is a real issue all the way around. Rabbits and now all the flood water.
Just thinking about all the dead ones and the smell. Seems like the country has a 'minor' problem to think about.

Unless they decide it's on the land owner to fix the problems. Good Luck with your plans.
Whatever they might be moving forward.