How one man messed up all of Australia's ecosystem.
How one man messed up all of Australia’s ecosystem.
This is just another short and funny piece of history.
This is the story about an English man called Thomas Austin, who in 1859 started what would become Australia’s rabbit problem.
Mr. Austin emigrated to Australia as a teenager and after some successful year he became a wealthy landowner, owning almost 29,000 acres of land near the city of Victoria. Thomas became a bit homesick and started taking on some English activities in his land, such as breeding and training racehorses, and hunting.
His love of hunting and his feeling of homesick led him to create what would become a major rabbit problem in Australia. Austin decided that hunting kangaroos and wallabies wasn’t enough, so he resolved in importing some English animals to hunt, such as rabbits. He imported 24 English rabbits into Australia and let them free in his land with the hope of hunting them.
The problem became a major one a few years later, rabbits breed and they breed a lot. By 1861 Mr. Austin had thousands of rabbits in his land, more than he could hunt at the time. Years later, by 1871 approximately two million rabbits were being hunted each year in Victoria, without stopping the rabbit population from increasing. Soon, by 1920 the rabbit population was estimated at 10 billion rabbits distributed among all of Australia, now you see why it became a major problem.
Rabbits created a ton of problems for the Australian cities, they ate a lot and even extinguished some plant species, causing some other animal species to have a hard time finding food.
In 1900’s the Australian government began testing ways to get rid of the rabbits, so they built a huge fence, expanding almost a thousand miles across Australia in an effort to keep the rabbits on the western side of the island, but, well rabbits can jump and dig you know, so the fence didn’t provide the results that the government was hoping for.
It was until the 1990’s that the modern times came up with a solution to diminish the rabbit population. Scientists began researching with deseases, in the hope of creating a deadly disease for rabbits. One of the deseases being tested got loose (by mistake!) and quickly spread through Australia, thankfully it wasn’t a deadly disease for humans, but it worked marvelously with rabbits and since 1995 the rabbit population in Australia has declined, thus restoring vegetation and increasing the number of other animal species.
If you want to read more about this story you may find it in the book “Humans: A Brief History of How We F****ed It All Up” from Tom Phillips.
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