In Australian culture, the most evil animal is not the big grey Wolf, not even the lion, the tiger, but the rabbits who look like lively and lovely.
In 1859, an English farmer named Thomas Austin came to Australia. Among the gifts he carried were 24 European rabbits, five hares and 72 quails. As a standard English gentleman, Austin had a special interest in hunting, so he released the rabbits into his territory near Geelong. So that in his spare time, he could enjoy riding horses and hunting rabbits with other farmers.
At that time, no one could predicted how fast rabbits would reproduce. With no natural enemies such as eagles, foxes and wolves, the European rabbit found itself in paradise. Besides, the soil here is loose and it is very convenient to make holes and nests. So an almost unrestrained and terrifying expansion began.
The offspring of the rabbit then spread in all directions at an average rate of 130 kilometer a year. By 1896, the rabbit had spread to Queensland to the north, and south Australia to the south. And they had run across the continent to western Australia. By 1907, the rabbit had spread to the whole continent. The populations of rabbit also increases exponentially. In 1890 there were 36 million rabbits in new south wales alone. By 1926, the number of rabbits in Australia had grown to a record of 10 billion.
Ten billion rabbits eat the same amount of pasture as one billion sheep do. Is hard to measure what the economic lost that Australia suffered.
On the contrary, the native kangaroos, Bag raccoon, and so on, who are in the same small ecological environment as the rabbits, are completely not competitive. Large Numbers of rabbits not only occupied the burrows of these native animals, but also robbed their food, leaving the milder marsupials to starve. Decades later, one of Australia's oldest and smallest kangaroos, the Kangaroo rat, died out.
Almost all the grass in Australia was eaten up. Australians have tried all kinds of methods: foxes, rabbit hunting, hedgerows and breeding rabbit hemorrhagic virus. But the vigorous rabbits are still alive, and human could never kill them all.
The government also rewards people who hunt more rabbits, encouraging locals to kill more rabbits. Although rabbit hunting competitions were held every year, the number of animals being killed in the whole year is less than that of rabbits breeding in a month. As the wild rabbits have more bones and less meat, Australians are not interested in rabbit meat.
Clever Australians had tried their best to kill rabbits. But In the end, there is no obvious effect. Up to now, they are still being bothered by rabbits. I don't know when this hundred years' war between humans and rabbits will end,but it has been recognized as the worst biological invasion in human history.