Page:The Boy Travellers in Australasia.djvu/298

274 but here, where they have no natural enemies, the country suffers terribly. Many a sheep-farmer has been ruined by the total destruction of his pasturage, and the loss to the colony may be reckoned by millions of dollars.



"Australia and Tasmania are equally afflicted by rabbits," the gentleman continued, "which were introduced into those countries from New Zealand for the same reasons that they were introduced here. Millions of pounds sterling would not compensate for their ravages, and the public and private expenditure for their destruction has already mounted into those figures. Dogs, ferrets, poison, trapping, drowning, and every other known means have been tried to reduce them, but without success. Occasionally the whole population turns out for a rabbit 'battue,' in which many thousands of the animals are killed. The owners of sheep and cattle runs have built hundreds of miles of rabbit-fences, and the colonial governments have done likewise; the fences stop the progress of the vermin for a time, but after a while they manage to burrow beneath them and come up on the other side, and so the fences are not effective to prevent the spread of the pest."