Pullulating Epizootic

In Australia, the rabbit is a public enemy. He nibbles the sheep ranges bald, defies traps and poison, and reproduces with devastating abandon. About the only thing he has not done is to take a gun to the human hunters, as the rabbit did in the nursery rhyme, Struwwelpeter. Thus, few Australians mourned when government anti-rabbit scientists declared biological warfare on the rabbit. They imported from South America a rabbit virus disease, myxomatosis, which kills by causing tumors, and in 1950 planted it in Australia's rabbit-infested backlands. It spread like a grass fire, killing rabbits by the million. In some parts of Australia, the rabbit population was reduced to one-tenth. The sheep-raisers had reason to rejoice: the range grew green again and the sheep grew fat.

New Process. One interested party who read about this planned epizootic was Dr. Paul Armand-Delille, a leading French pediatrician who owns a chateau near Chartres. Rabbits are not public enemies in France. Their natural enemies, including 1,800,000 Frenchmen with hunting licenses, keep them from eating the country bare. But. Dr. Armand-Delille's estate was skittering with rabbits, so he decided to rub them out in the latest scientific manner.

Last year he imported from Australia cultures of the virus that causes myxomatosis. He caught a few wild rabbits, inoculated them with the disease, and turned them loose. Results were so satisfactory that he sent to the Academic d'Agriculture de France a learned paper entitled "A New Process of Limiting the Pullulation of Rabbits."

Last week Dr. Armand-Delille was probably sorry, because myxomatosis was pullulating over most of France, killing up to 99% of the wild rabbits. Dead rabbits littered the roads. Sick rabbits with horribly swollen heads hopped feebly under the wheels of cars. Fields and woods along the Loire stank with decaying bodies. The epizootic showed no signs of slowing down; it was approaching the Belgian and Spanish frontiers and would probably spread through all of mainland Europe.

National Calamity. Myxomatosis is now a fighting word in France, and Professor Armand-Delille is regarded as something of a public enemy. French furriers see a bleak future ahead with no more cheap rabbitskins to glamorize into expensive-looking furs. French hunting (it was mostly rabbits) has been almost destroyed. Manufacturers of guns and ammunition are despondent. The injured parties have organized an "Association de Defense contre la Myxomatose."

Even economists are up in arms. Since rabbit meat is a staple food in France and one of the items used to calculate the cost of living, its virtual disappearance might justify demands for higher wages, with strikes to enforce the demands. Already newspapers were calling the disease a national calamity. Said the Paris-Presse : "Myxomatosis not only menaces our rabbits; it also menaces our living-cost index." The Communists, of course, were blaming the whole thing on "les Ricains" (Americans).

Tame rabbits, which resist the disease better than their wild cousins, can be vaccinated against it without very much trouble. Last week the Pasteur Institute was shipping 152,000 doses of vaccine daily to farmers and veterinarians. But wild rabbits will not hold still for vaccination. Probably nothing can be done for them until they develop natural immunity and can pullulate again. In some parts of Australia the rabbits started a comeback in about three years.

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