Send in the dropbears!
Well, I can only assume that it’s because they fuck like rabbits.
because they aren’t cats
The title says “rabbits are the biggest threat to Australia’s native species.” That’s a claim that I find extremely unlikely, with some really obvious top tier candidates such as humans (destruction of ecosystems) and climate change.
So I quickly skimmed through the article to get a sense of why rabbits were so damaging - and there doesn’t seem to be anything in the article that even refers to the claim. They do say that when rabbit numbers dropped, some other species started doing better. And there was another comment saying that rabbit attract feral predators such as cats and foxes - which to me kind of feels like blaming some of the damage of cats and foxes on rabbits just for the sake of the article.
Meh. Maybe I’m making too much of this. The content is fine and interesting. But the title… it seems dishonest. I don’t like that.
Rabbits strip groundcover and seedlings, preventing woodland regeneration and eliminating habitats for native species. They also prop up cat and fox numbers
Had an Australian friend explain it to me once.
You know that footage of the swarm of locusts so thick it blots out the sun, swarming over a field of corn? And when they leave, it’s like the field got flattened by a very big, very hungry hammer?
That. But imagine if it was fluffy.
Now, keeping that picture in mind, spread that out over a wide area with no real natural predators that are large or voracious enough to pose a real check on their population.
This is a pretty serious problem.
You just described a threat to farmers, not native species.
See, here’s the thing.
Rabbits aren’t native to Australia. At all. The flora never evolved to withstand that kind of aggressive grazing. They. Eat. Everything. Including the scrub that protects the topsoil and keeps it from drying out and blowing away in dust storms.
Yes, I know. I am Australian. This is an Australian community.
Then what would you say is a more serious ecological threat to the native flora and fauna of the continent? Apart from global warming, that one’s a given.
I’m being serious, I want to hear what you have to say.
so only carnivores are bad, got it
