permaculture

[Jennifer Nazak <jnazak@yahoo.com>]

I wonder if part of the problem in that case was that the rabbit population, 
after several years of quite a few people in the area keeping rabbits, had 
devolved to a monoculture or otherwise insufficiently diverse population 
which rendered it vulnerable to the scourges you describe.

As with so many situations, preserving diversity is important for longterm 
viability. I've heard that indigenous Peruvian tribes grew thousands of 
different types of potatoes. Monocultures are something we constantly have to 
watch out for. It's easy to see how a monoculture could evolve over time, as 
people have success with a certain species (be it plant, animal, or what have 
you).

jenny

"Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it 
passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are 
marked by changes in the face of Nature." -- Robert Louis Stevenson, _Travels 
with a Donkey_


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All went well for a number of years and there were quite a few people here 
keeping rabbits. From about 1992 things went downhill fast. A cat dragged in 
a wild rabbit with mixomatosis and that decimated our herd. Then it seems 
the forestry service here brought in another virus (from China?) to cull 
wild rabbits in forestry areas and upon that all the people we knew to have 
had rabbits ran into very severe problems and gave up on them completely if 
they did not die out under their own steam. Litter sizes dropped and young 
rabbits died before reaching maturity.