Paper short abstract:

By 1900, European rabbits occupied the worst possible categories for non-human animals in Australia: introduced, pest, wild and prolific. This paper explores disgust as a necessary component of the long, but ultimately unsuccessful, campaign of eradication waged against the rabbit in Australia.

Paper long abstract:

European rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) entered Australia’s ecocultural networks slowly at first and then rapidly after wild rabbits arrived in Wadawurrung country in western Victoria in the 1850s. By 1900, rabbits occupied the worst possible categories for non-human animals in Australia: introduced, pest, wild and prolific. Perceived by settler colonists as a serious threat to the pastoral industry, rabbits became outsiders. They were no longer appealing to hunt for sport or meat, but were liable to mass killing through poisoning, deliberate infection with disease, exclusion by continental scale fencing and other lethal measures. To naturalist David Stead in 1928, rabbits were a noxious and insidious menace, proper objects of disgust.

The transformation of rabbits from charismatic and cherished denizen of the English countryside and children’s storybooks to antipodean trash animal (Nagy and Johnson, eds., 2013) will be explored in this paper, drawing upon scientific studies, popular accounts, newspaper correspondence and visual material. This shift was something of an intellectual feat. Rabbits had little in common with classically disgusting things, which are slimy, slithery, wriggly, oily and viscid (Miller, 1997). Instead, contemporaries focused to their large numbers and irregular movement, sometimes describing them as a grey blanket laid over the land. Rabbits were at their worst, however, when the measures taken against them took their toll. Images of dead and dying rabbits were circulated to be viewed with both disgust and satisfaction. Disgust was a necessary component of the long, but ultimately unsuccessful, campaign of eradication waged against the Australian rabbit.