Thread: Virus

What is amazing is they are saying that they hope to achieve at least a 40 % kill on this new release. When I was still doing pest control work they always said you needed to be getting kill rates in the high 80 to 90 % to have any sort of effect on the populations. 40% will do very little except to promote increased breeding with the remaining population.
Back in the late 90's when it first hit my area in the BOP I had count lines established over 20km's of farmland and we counted the lines twice a year.
The year the illegal release was done I had counted close to 1100 rabbits pre the virus within a week it had spread through the whole area and when the post count was done I counted 32 rabbits.
We warned the farmers that these remaining rabbits would come back if left to there own devices, which they were and with a year and a half were back to pre virus levels. Problem now was you had rabbits that are resistant to any future releases. This is a different strain but 40 % is a pretty low kill rate I think. It will be interesting to see how it effects the populations over the coming months. One thing is for sure the rabbit will survive whatever man can throw at them.