Given the question: Build a movie plot around this: What animal does Amanda find in the mine? Rabbit
The answer is:
The movie opens showing a news report about how overpopulation is not just a human problem, but exists in the animal kingdom as well, using the rabbit population explosion in Australia in the 1950s as an example. There was a similar plague of rabbits getting out of hand in the American Southwest, especially in Arizona, where the rabbits were devouring crops, destroying property, and out-competing livestock for a finite supply of food and water.Moving to the action in Arizona, our first view is of rancher Cole Hillman, riding his horse. The horse steps into a rabbit hole and injures itself, and Cole must shoot it and walk home. He instructs one of his ranch hands to take the truck to go get his saddle, then makes a phone call to the university in Ajo, hoping to find a cure for the rabbit infestation. He meets Dr. Elgin Clark, but his first suggestion is for the same person who killed all the coyotes that were keeping the rabbits in check. Cole is hesitant to make the same mistake twice, but agrees to visit the Bennett family, scientific researchers who are looking for more ecologically friendly ways of controlling wildlife.We meet the Bennetts, father Roy, mother Gerry, and daughter Amanda. Roy was capturing bats for an experiment. They want to control the bats' flight pattern, hoping to use them to kill mosquitoes, without the nasty side effects of DDT and other insecticides. Elgin Clark comes to see him and asks him to visit Cole, to see if he could come up with an ecologically friendly way to solve the rabbit problem. On the way there, they see ranchers desperately shooting at rabbits trying to preserve their livelihoods.At Cole's ranch, Cole explains his problem. Although hardly an environmentalist, Cole has reasons of his own for not wanting to use poison to kill the rabbits. The poison would harm his cattle, so he would have to sell them at distress prices, and eventually his land would become toxic and barren. He can hold out only a few more weeks before using the cyanide, and the other ranchers are...