Taken from The QI Book of Animal Ignorance
"The Sumatran striped rabbit is so rare and shy that their is no word for it in the language used where it lives. It was thought extinct in 1930s, and has only been seen 3 times since"
"There are over a hundred breeds of domestic rabbit in every shape, colour and size. All of them are bred from the European wild rabbit"
"The Unstoppable Pet-Pest"
"The introduction of a few rabbits could do little harm and might provide a touch of home, in addition to a spot of hunting." Rarely has a human prediction proved more wrong. These were the words of Thomas Austin, an English settler in Australian who released twenty-four rabbits on his farm in 1859. Ten years later, there were so many rabbits accress Australia that even a cull of two million made no dent in the population. By 1950, when the myxomatosis virus was introduced as a biological control, there were over one billion Aussie rabbits, the fastest spread of mammals ever recorded. As a result, an eighth of all native Australian mammals and an unquanifiable number of plant species perished, their habitats destroyed by overgrazing and erosion. Myxomatosis worked-the rabbit population was decimated, but the small number that survived have bred a genetic resistance to the disease, so a new, less affective virus (rabbit haemorrhagic disease) was introduced in 1995. The population is currently a hundred million and growing.
What makes the European rabbit so successful? Firstly, diet. They will eat most things that grow, and in quantity. A single rabbit can eat enough grass to stuff a decent sized pillow every day. Secondly, unlike hares and most other rabbit species, thet run a communual burrow system which supports a large number of breeding females. And finally, they breed like - well - rabbits. A doe is either pregnant, lactating or both at once; she can produce thirty kits a year and they are all able to reproduce within six months of being born. Males tend to disperse new colonies, females stay put to breed until the warren gets too crowded. Unless predation or disease intervenes, rabbit populations spiral.
Despite appearances, rabbits aren't rodents, they are lagomorphs (hare-shaped), one of over fifty species, including hares, pikas, jackrabbits and cottontails. Lagomorphs have a special trick: eating their food twice. Whereas a cow chews the cud, they eat their own droppings. Not the dry fibrous spheres we find scattered outside their burrows, but the contents of their large intestine, which look like bunches of shiny grapes and are full of bacteria, generating essential nutrients, especially B vitamins. Strictly speaking, despite their provenance, these are not faeces, but food. They are coated with rubbery mucus to protect them from the digestive process and rabbits will eat them directly from their bottoms.
It wasn't until the mid-nineteenth century that the resourceful rabbit became a serious agricultural problem in Britain. When they were first introduced by the Normans, rabbits were a valuable farm animal, kept in enclosed warrens for their meat and fur. Poaching rabbits was a high crime carrying draconian punishment. But by the 1820's, not only were landowners "enclosing" their land with endless miles of hedges (the perfect environment for escaped rabbits), they also unleashed an orgy of shooting, poisoning and trapping of the foxes, martens, stoats and birds of prey that had previously controlled the rabbit population.
The once exotic rabbit now costs British agriculture 100million each year.
Sat Feb 18, 2012 9:57 am
