Two rabbits, one white, the other black, are grazing placidly (do bunnies graze in any other way?) within a stone’s throw of Metchosin’s municipal hall.
I try to edge closer, but they scootch across a nearby riding ring. Safely on the other side, one of them pauses long enough to turn and give me a rude gesture.
Yes, Metchosin has a bunny problem.
This is not new. Last June, the Metchosin Muse published an article that declared: “The downtown rabbit population is skyrocketing.” This was shocking news to those who didn’t know Metchosin had a downtown.
It seems that a while back, somebody decided to make the municipal grounds a dumping site for unwanted domestic rabbits, which have bred and spread. Every time Jessica Rabbit (“I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way”) makes an appearance, Thumper turns into a humper. You know how rabbits are.
There have been enough complaints from gardeners and others that councillors feel compelled to do something. The question is whether that will mean trapping and relocating the rabbits or taking a more, um, final course of action.
“Do we catch them and inflict them on someone else, or do we just get rid of them?” is the way Mayor John Ranns put it.
“It will be an interesting council meeting when we decide which option to take.”
You get the sense that councillors would rather not have to deal with this one. “I’m a little disgusted with the eagles, that they’re not solving the problem,” Ranns says.
Heaven knows bunny politics are fraught with drama. Remember that it took years of hand-wringing before, in 2010, the University of Victoria announced plans to cull its burgeoning rabbit population, a decision that inspired a flood of angry letters to the editor. (By contrast, when a landmark Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness report came out that same week, the Times Colonist didn’t get a single letter. Not one.)
Eventually, the Great UVic Bunnycide saw more than 100 rabbits (or as we used to call them, “lunch”) given lethal injections before gentler measures were introduced; more than 700 were trapped and relocated to animal sanctuaries, including one in Coombs, where 24 of them were shot after escaping to a neighbouring farm.
Another cottontail controversy arose in 2016, when the Transportation Ministry reportedly paid $20,000 (Maclean’s magazine actually put the cost at $33,000) to trap more than 100 domestic bunnies at the Helmcken Road interchange. Volunteers fundraised a similar amount to truck and fly the animals to the Retired Rabbits Sanctuary in Texas. (This is why people in poor countries want to kill us in our sleep.)
Coverage of the 2016 airlift prompted a TC reader to respond with a story from New Zealand, where a Lions Club sponsors an annual Easter Bunny Hunt in which teams kill as many rabbits as they can in 24 hours. Money raised in that year’s hunt, in which 10,000 animals got the Elmer Fudd treatment, was donated to a local hospital.
Speaking of local hospitals, it’s worth noting that Victoria General didn’t get the same blowback as UVic when the bunnies on the View Royal facility’s grounds quietly disappeared. That reflects another reality: the farther you get from the urban core, the less hesitant people tend to be about doing in animals.
No one in rural B.C. batted an eye when the province urged hunters to kill feral pigs, descendants of escaped farm animals, “anywhere and at any time.”
North Island drivers might recall the stone-cold practicality of a highway-side sign that read: “For sale: Rabbits for pets or meat.” When up-Island people say they’re having deer for supper, they mean as an entree; in Victoria, they mean as invited guests, the kind who show up at the door with a nice bottle of wine and a partially eaten bouquet.
The squeamishness can have consequences. Ten years ago, when urban backyard agriculture came into vogue, Victoria chicken growers found themselves wondering what to do with the roosters. Not only do most bylaws ban them, but roosters are raucous. They make more noise than a flock of I-love-you-man drunks staggering down your street at 4 a.m., except the drunks don’t do it every single morning. If you want to meet your neighbours in a hurry, just try raising a rooster.
As a result, Metchosin suffered an epidemic of chicken chucking as city folk, unwilling to haul out the axe, resorted to simply driving to the country and booting Rusty out of the car. Goodbye, backyard bird, hello rural roadside refugee. Left on their own, most met fowl play.
It was also around that time that abandoned rabbits were blamed for gobbling up an endangered plant, the seaside birds-foot lotus, which had been clinging to life at William Head prison and the Rocky Point ammo depot.
Remember that as Easter approaches: Bunny dumping just means passing the buck.
