The Martlet

A big question on the minds of UVic administrators these days is what to do with the exploding rabbit population.

The Rabbit Pilot Project, a sterilization program undertaken by the university last year, was ineffective in shrinking the rabbit population, and was prohibitively expensive. After $17, 743 was spent, 40 sterilized rabbits, tattooed for identification, were released back on to campus, away from the “rabbit-free” zones.

Now the only other options that occur to me are 1) relocating them or 2) culling the population.

Relocating the rabbits doesn’t seem to be an option, especially because complications concerning taking the rabbits out of their habitat was a huge setback in the Pilot Project. Could UVic find a nice petting zoo, a humane laboratory­, or a desperate butcher’s shop to take them? Even if they found a petting zoo willing to take an influx of rabbits, I don’t think they would take a couple of hundred at once — no matter how cute they were. And I seriously doubt we could ask families to take them in as pets, since many rabbits were originally abandoned here because people didn’t want them.

So that just leaves culling, as the UVic administration has made it clear that the rabbits have to be dealt with — their feces alone poses a significant health risk to people on campus and the rabbits cause thousands of dollars in damage to the university by eating the foliage.

My smart-ass roommate believes the rabbits should all be turned into homosexual creatures; that’ll solve the problem eventually.

The solution I prefer is a little less 1984: set up rabbit traps on campus (like bear traps), with appropriate signs to warn students and passersby. The traps will kill the rabbits and their carcasses can later be collected and disposed of by the groundskeepers or picked at by the hawks who eat the rabbits anyway.

That seems the most effective and safest way to cull the rabbits, unless the UVic Board of Governors want to authorize closing the campus so a bunch of staff with rifles and shotguns can comb the university grounds and shoot them. Running around campus with guns just doesn’t seem quite safe to me. The administration could use poison to get rid of these pesky creatures, but when it comes to using poison, let’s not forget that the rabbits won’t be the only UVic critters likely to stumble upon it.

A lot of people reading this will think “Stuart’s a monster” or “He doesn’t know what the most humane way of dealing with the rabbit population is” or maybe, “He’s a sociopath.”

To these people, I ask this very simple question: would you care so deeply if this was an infestation of cockroaches rather than rabbits?

I didn’t think so.