Tuesday, May 24, 2005

Rabbit Raids

Dallas Morning News
January 4, 1896

WACO, Tex., Jan. 3 -- The fruit growers are troubled this year with rabbit raids on the peach, plum and pear trees. The bunnies come into the orchards in great droves and belt the trees for the sake of the tender bark. All sorts of rabbits attack the fruit trees. In the traps set to catch them the cotton tails are the most numerous. Swamp rabbits and mule-ears are occasionally caught. The brown prairies at this season of the year, with no herbage to offer for winter food, are deserted and the rabbits have crowded into the timber-lands and cedar brakes. Cold nights they become desperate from hunger and enter the city, attacking the trees in the nurseries and the shrubbery on the lawns.

The comment is made by the horticulturists that the boys and men who carry shotguns and slaughter birds indiscriminately neglect the rabbits and allow them to multiply to a pestiferous extent, while exterminating the insect-eating birds.

Some of the fruit growers have found that a bunch of bottles hung six inches up the trunk in such a way that they will clink together a little when the wind shakes them will protect the trees from the nibbling teeth of the hungry bunnies, which is sure death to the trees, as the rabbits when undisturbed take off the bark all around.

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