Disease takes its toll on Britain’s wild rabbit population

WHERE have all the rabbits gone? It was a question I asked myself the other day when – for probably the first time in a couple of years – I came across a telltale scrape in the ground and some familiar looking pelletshaped droppings and realised a bunny had been digging in the bank on my regular dog walking route.

What has become an unusual sight – evidence of rabbit activity – was once so common as to be barely worth mentioning. When we lived in a barn conversion 15 years ago the field behind us was alive with rabbits. We had whippets at the time and they would wait for a foolish bunny to slip under the fence to nibble our plants, then see if they could race them to the boundary. The rabbits mostly won – but occassionally a whippet would trot to the back door, clutching his prize.

Then the odds became stacked in the dogs’ favour and it soon became clear why – myxomatosis, a disease which flares up from time to time in the wild, along with rabbit haemorrhagic disease was taking its toll. A ‘myxi’ rabbit is a very sad sight and I wasn’t sorry to see these half blind creatures put out of their misery with a quick shake in a whippet’s jaws. But the wider implications have seen a major part of the British wildlife scene dramatically reduced.

Estimates vary but some suggest that the British rabbit population has declined by up to 60% in 20 years. That still leaves quite a lot of rabbits in some areas and they can be a major agricultural pest, but in others the sight of a rabbit scuttling away, white tail bobbing, has been lost to a generation. Not that long ago rabbits were a managed source of protein, living in warrens and taken for their meat. That still happens in some areas, but numbers are well down.