The Manitowoc pilot. [volume] (Manitowoc, Wis.) 1859-1932, 1888-02-02
manitouof pilot.
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 2.
The Rabbit Pest in Australia.

III. Pasteur has written to the editor
of the Paris Temps the following
| letter:
Your journal announced few days
| ago that the Government of New South
Wales was helpless in its fight with a
peculiar plague-the multiplication of
525, 900 francs for the discovery of a
method for exterminating them. Con-
siderable portions of New Zealand, not
less rayaged than Australia, have
been abandoned by the farmers, who
gave up sheep raising owing to the
impossibility of finding food for them.
Every winter the rabbits are slaugh-
tered by the million, but without any
apparent effect on their numbers.
Will you permit me TO communicate
to the distant countries, through the
medium of the Temps, some ideas the
application of which might perhaps be
attended by some success?
Up to the present in combating this
nuisance, use has been made of min
eral substances, notably phosphorus
| compounds. But was not this a
wrong method? What can such min
eral poisons do towards destroying
animals which. increase and multiply
at frightful rate? Such poisons kill
on the spot where they are placed, but,
in truth, to reach living creatures, do
we not need rather, if l may so express
myself, poison endowed with life,
like themselves, and able, like them
selves, to multiply at surprising
rate?
What l wish therefore, is that an at
tempt be made to carry death into the
burrows of New South Wales and New
Zealand by trying to communicate to
the rabbits a disease which may be-
come epidemic.
There is one which is known as
chicken cholera Cholera DIES poules, }
and which has been the subject of ex-
tended study in laboratory. This
disease is also common to rabbits.
Now, among the experiences l have
gathered is this: | collected within a
limited space a certain number of
chickens, and, after had given them
some food poisoned with the microbe
which is the cause of chicken cholera,
they died on the spot.
Farmyards are sometimes ravaged
by true epidemics of this species, the
propagation of which is doubtless due
to the injecting of the soil and food by
| the excrements of those which are first
seized with the disease. / fancy that
the same would happen in the case OF
rabbits, and that returning to their
| burrows to die there, they would COM
| municate the disease to others, which
in turn would spread it. But how
could the destructive germs be con-
veyed into the bodies of the first rab-
bits? Nothing is easier. l would
make an Enclosure including certain
space where the rabbits look for food,
| experience has shown that it is easy to
| cultivate in state of perfect purity,
and on as large scale as is desired,
| microbes of chicken cholera in some
extract of meat. With this liquid, full
| of microbes, the food of the rabbit
should be watered, and they would
| scatter to die in various places and
thus distribute the poison everywhere.
| will add that the microbe of the
disease in question is harmless to farm
| animals, except, of course to chickens,
but these need not be allowed to be at
large.
/ do not doubt that there are in the
plague-stricken countries persons pre-
pared to apply the method suggested
here-a method which is very simple,
and which, in any case, is worthy of a
| trial.