The rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) is widespread and common in Britain. It’s not native here, being originally from the Iberian Peninsula. It was introduced about 1000 years ago and farmed for meat and fur. Now it’s naturalised and it eats crops, so it’s classed as a pest species and it can be shot at any time. Here’s a guide to shooting rabbits.
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I can’t push like for shooting rabbits. I understand the pest part. But I still can’t push “like”.
Fair enough. I’m going to continue blogging about shooting and probably about fishing too. Some people will like this, others won’t.
I wonder how the introduction of rabbits affected the native hare populations back then? I don’t suppose we’ll ever know, the Romans and Celts not being great ones for environmental studies as far as I know, but I wonder if they competed for resources or if it worked the other way and the rabbits were easier prey for the native carrnivores (of which there were a few more back then) and thus took the pressure off the hare population.
I do think that if rabbits need removing, shooting them is probably more humane than myxamatosis – if nothing else, diseases can mutate and then move to other species if one is very unlucky and bullets tend not to do that!
Yes myxi is pretty cruel. You probably know that it’s endemic in British rabbits now, flaring up some years and cutting the population until the rabbits bounce back. (Oops pun)
That’s an interesting point about the hare population when rabbits were introduced. Again, I’m sure you know this, but rabbits were kept in semi-natural warrens from which they were harvested until quite recently. It’s not obvious to me how rabbits and hares might compete, but perhaps they do.
I assumed that as hares and rabbits are both lagomorphs that they would occupy the same ecological niche, but I didn’t look into it – I suppose they don’t compete for places to live since rabbits are burrowers and hares just sleep in “forms” but I was wondering if they had the same food sources. I had a quick google and found that someone has written a paper about it which can be found here ;- http://www.springerlink.com/content/m438p6261x175gu8/
Thank you. There’s also this http://www.ivb.cz/folia/53/3/255-268.pdf which describes a study in Hungary, involving the same species of rabbits and hares which are present in Britain.
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