Rabbits Gone Wild

Photo: Robin Hammond for The New York Times

Robben Island, the famous sliver of land in South Africa’s Table Bay where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 18 years, has an animal control problem.

…this island is overrun with rabbits, multiplying at the astonishing rates for which they are renowned. They have burrowed beneath the historic buildings and denuded the place of the leafy plants that keep the soil from whooshing into a dust bowl…For the island’s managers, the rabbits long ago ceased being furry innocents and are viewed instead as maddening varmints. Various efforts have been made to control the population but every idea failed in one way or another…The females can breed at three months of age and are capable of delivering litters of eight six times a year [New York Times].

The news is (partial) vindication for South Carolina’s Lt. Governor Andre Bauer (and his grandmother) who told an audience last week about the consequences of poor resource management.

“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals,” Bauer told a Greenville-area crowd. “You know why? Because they breed. “You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”

Human population control policies are under review.