Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 July 1896 — FENCE 400 MILES LONG. [ARTICLE]

FENCE 400 MILES LONG.

Battles o* the Australians With the Destructive Rabbit. The New South Wales government, it may be remembered, offered a rward of $125,000 to any person or persons who could suggest an efficient method of getting rid of the rabbit: but. although this liberal reward led to the receipt of no fewer than 2.600 ".chemos from all parts of the world, none of them was regarded as satisfactory, and the offer was withdrawn. The final outcome of royal commissions, of intercolonial conferences and of the testing of every practical method of extermination, is that the most effectual method of dealing with the evil is found to be the construction of rabbitproof netting, by means of which the animals can be kept from acres not yet infested, can be shut off from food supplies and can be more effectually dealt with locally. The length of some of these fences is enormous. There is one starting at Barringun, on the Queensland border, and following the Main Trunk line from Bourke to Corowa—a distance of 407 miles; and there is another along the entire western boundary of New South Wales—a distance of 346 miles. The Queensland government, too, has erected a similar fence along a considerable portion of the northern boundary of New South Wales, but the surveyor general of Queensland, in the report already referred to, says that “the rabbits must have come through the fence in mobs and droves of innumerable multitudes at some time,” and thus have established themselves in Queensland as well. This, of course, is the weak point in regard to fences, which are liable to break down in places, more especially in times of flood and where they cross over creeks, while keeping of constant supervision over the fences, so that immediate repairs can be done when openings appear, is quite impracticable where the distances are so great. In many instances countless thousands of rabbits have been seen on one side of a fence dead or dying of starvation, after eating all the available food supplies, and leaping up at the fence in their attempts to surmount it. One can imagine how they would rush through in the event of any opening appearing, and how a single break in the fence might be the doom of a country not previously infested.