permaculture

["John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>]

I don't think inbreeding was the problem. Some ten years beforehand there 
was a big push from the dep of ag to start breeding rabbits to increase farm 
incomes. At that stage all kinds of breeds were imported from Flemish giants 
to Californian whites and everything in between. The main push failed 
because there was really no market for rabbit meat. (the same thing was done 
with vineyard snails, deer and ostriches and all those came to nothing as 
well). But anyway there was a huge variety of different breeds freely 
available when we started here.
Also, when I mentioned quite a few people I mean maybe twenty in an area of 
maybe twenty square miles. And none of these people had huge numbers of 
animals. They were all for home use and maybe some bartering.

As to monoculture and potatoes. I try to grow a couple of dozen new potatoes 
out from carefully hand pollinated seed every year. Have found nothing 
spectacular yet except for disease resistance.
John

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_


________________________________

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.
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