Some 1,500 municipalities in 10 autonomous communities (Aragon, Andalusia, Castilla La Mancha, Castilla y León, Catalonia, the Community of Madrid, the Valencian Community, La Rioja, Navarra and the Region of Murcia) are currently in a “hunting emergency” situation. due to the high presence (overpopulation) of rabbits in areas where they cause damage to crops and infrastructures. The regulations on this “emergency” differ in each community but share the strategy of facilitating the hunting or capture of rabbits in order to try to reduce the population of these lagomorphs.
Various farmers’ organizations have been demanding for months (if not years) that the administrations take effective measures to deal with this problem or, failing that, provide facilities and financial aid for individuals to act on their own.
An example of this unrest was the demonstration in which about 5,000 farmers participated – with about 1,200 tractors – in Lleida on March 3, called by the platform Pagesos o conills (Peasants or rabbits), which includes the agricultural unions Unió of Farmers, Young Farmers and Farmers of Catalonia (JARC), Asaja and the Federation of Agricultural Cooperatives of Catalonia (FCAC).
The Coordinator of Organizations of Farmers and Ranchers (COAG) has added fuel to the fire in recent weeks demanding measures against what it considers a “Jurassic Park rabbits in the Spanish countryside”, as indicated verbatim in the title of its informative note published on 27 of March.
COAG affirms that “the situation is critical and desperate”. “We are facing an unprecedented plague of hybrid rabbits that has never been seen before. It is a mix of wild rabbit with domestic. Bigger, more voracious and with a greater capacity to procreate”, affirms this agrarian confederation.
Elaborating on this particular interpretation of the situation, COAG distributes the blame between the citizens and the administrations: “There has been irresponsibility on the part of the citizens (who abandon domestic rabbits when they get tired of them as pets and throw them out into the field) and of the same administrations, which have attempted to artificially shape the natural world, allowing rabbits to proliferate unchecked to feed endangered species such as lynx”.
Among the aspects of dubious credibility in COAG’s statements is the claim that the “plague” is due to the existence of “hybrid rabbits”, “a mixture of wild and domestic rabbits”.
Several scientists have responded to COAG’s claims. Thus, for example, José Guerrero Casado (professor in the Department of Zoology at the University of Córdoba), Carlos Rouco Zufiaurre (professor of Ecology at the University of Seville) and Francisco Sánchez Tortosa (professor in the area of ​​Zoology at the University of Córdoba) have signed an article published in The Conversation with this explanatory headline: “They are not hybrid rabbits, they are hungry rabbits due to the lack of natural food.”
In a very similar sense, the biologist and environmental consultant Francisco J. MartÃn Barranco believes that one cannot properly speak of a “plague” or blame hybrid rabbits for the problem. It is not a state-scale plague because it affects very specific areas of a certain number of communities and “one can only speak of hybridization in very specific cases”, since the vast majority of the specimens present in the natural environment throughout Spain belong to to Oryctolagus cunniculus’, a “genetically identical species of common rabbit,” MartÃn Barranco explained to Efe.
Professors Guerrero, Rouco and Sánchez explain that the scenario of hybrid rabbits described by the COAG “does not correspond to reality”, to use soft words. “The wild or mountain rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) is a species native to the Iberian Peninsula. All varieties of domestic rabbit have derived from the subspecies O. cuniculus cuniculus. Therefore, wild and domestic rabbits are the same species “. “It is true that we can find in some wild populations rabbits with “domestic” traits, possibly due to the release of rabbits of dubious genetics used in some hunting repopulations, but this presence is merely testimonial”, affirm Guerrero, Rouco and Sánchez before addressing the possible causes of the proliferation of these animals in crop areas.
These three university professors explain that, in the case of the rabbit, there are three key elements that have generated imbalances in the populations: “Shortage of natural food, lack of predation (natural and hunting) and the reduction of the negative impact of diseases”.
These experts recall a study carried out more than a decade ago in vineyards in Córdoba “determined that the damage caused by rabbits was conditioned by the amount of natural food (diversity and abundance of herbaceous plants) and not only by the abundance of this mammal”. “That is, at similar abundances of rabbits, damage to crops is much greater in those where the availability of natural food is scarce. In other words, the elimination of so-called “weeds” forces rabbits to feed on rabbits. crops. This phenomenon could have been accentuated this year due to the drought”, expose professors Guerrero, Rouco and Sánchez.
These authors explain that rabbits would cause less damage to crops if, for example, farmers allowed vegetation to grow between lanes of woody crops or in uncultivated areas. Rabbit damage to crops is also explained by the disappearance (extermination in some cases) of natural predators of this species, such as the fox. The scarce or poor management of hunting and the decrease in rabbit diseases such as myxomatosis or viral haemorrhagic disease would add to the factors that explain the current situation; aggravated by drought.
The conclusions and reflections of professors Guerrero, Rouco and Sánchez are not wasted: “Ultimately, it is the dysfunction of the ecosystem and not the hybridization that is causing this damage. The unfounded news that defames rabbits contributes to generating a climate of tension and confusion that can lead to false accusations and actions against this key species for the ecosystem”.
