Philippa Stevenson: Multiplication is the name of the game in the country

It started with just one rabbit, cute as a button, bobbing around the garden.

I thought it would be nice for the grandkids to see it in its natural state so I banned any shooting around the house. Let them be dispatched elsewhere in our bit of countryside but the land in sight of the lounge was to be Peter Rabbit heaven.

Then there were two rabbits - mum and wee Peter - nibbling at the grass along the drive and ducking into the bushes when startled. Mind you, this sight tended to be for my benefit alone. When I called on the grandkids to witness the daily sorties they were rarely quick enough even to see departing cottontail and soon tired of the profitless game.

While mum and Peter staked out the front garden a bigger rabbit hopped into backyard view. Then there were two playing chasey around the clothesline. Then three, apparently thinking the world was their carrot. One day they even hopped up on the deck to nibble seeds fallen from an overhanging tree.

About then I thought I'd see what was happening with the release of the calicivirus. I didn't necessarily wish harm on "my" rabbits but if my single cutie had multiplied to at least five in just a few months I figured it was likely my district had a bit of a bunny problem.

And so it does, says Environment Waikato biosecurity operations manager Peter Russell.

My home patch of Tamahere is, like many another along the Waikato River with its sandy riverbanks and gullies, ideal bunny breeding ground.

Wet and cold Waikato winters often bump a few off but the climate has been kinder lately. After the calicivirus was released illegally in 1997 we think it may have swept through our district - one or two rabbits were found strangely dead in the middle of paddocks. But there's been no sign of that for a while. Quite the opposite.

It doesn't pay to get mushy about rabbits. Bunnikins crockery, stories like Watership Down and my old mate Peter Rabbit all tend to make us as soft on these pests as our kids' cuddly toys.

In a comment in the Herald in June, SPCA Auckland chief executive Bob Kerridge bewailed rabbits' status as pests rather than beloved pets and wondered - a tad contradictorily - why they couldn't be used as dog food.

Here's why. Rabbits were imported in the 1800s as a resource - to be game animals for sportsmen, as a food source and to remind pioneer Britons of home.

Their numbers grew so quickly a rabbit skin export industry, mainly in the South Island, exported 33,000 skins by 1873 and 17 million by 1894. Later a significant trade developed in canned and frozen rabbit meat. Even by the late 1940s, rabbit skins and carcasses were being exported in their millions but the effect on the landscape and on the economics of more profitable sheep farming was disastrous. Recent research shows that rabbits breed faster in New Zealand than anywhere else. The average doe has up to 50 kittens a year and can live for around 10 years. Forty per cent of her young survive longer than six months.

As it happens, all those environment- and farm-damaging progeny did not have to fear a re-release of the calicivirus by the four regional councils - Waikato, Northland, Southland, and Canterbury - that won regulatory approval to do so.

The virus had to be released in June and July before the breeding season because rabbits up to eight weeks old do not die of the disease. They become immune and survive to breed in the following season.

But Russell says a mistake by the Australian distributor meant that the virus, which should have arrived in Wellington frozen, thawed in an overlong journey. The resulting testing required to ensure it was still viable left the councils with too little time for this year's programme.

They had intended a trial release for areas similar to mine - urban or semi-urban places with small, isolated rabbit populations where normal control methods such as poisoning, shooting and trapping are not possible or effective.

Environment Waikato's trials were planned on the Coromandel at the beach settlements of Pauanui and Matarangi, and near Taupo at Omori and Kuratau.

Rather than release the virus in hopes of creating an epidemic spread from rabbit to rabbit, it was intended - and is now scheduled for next year - to use it as a biocide. The rabbits would die from directly eating virus infected baits.

For now, it's back to traditional control methods around Taupo where rabbit numbers are high but their relatively fewer Coromandel cousins lurking under baches and boats have a year's reprieve.

If the re-scheduled trial goes well the method could be used in future on gun-shy areas like mine where my daily rabbit count may soon become a cure for insomnia.

Sometimes you've just got to know the difference between pet and pest.