On the first fleet
were several silverish
grey haired rabbiters.
On arrival they bred quickly.
Like a silver-greyish human blanket
the hairy rabbiters spread across Australia.
Rabbiters were distressed.
In the year of the Federation of the Rabbit,
the government gave unprecedented amounts
of electricity, money & fencing materials
to help rabbits build fences
to keep the hairy rabbiters out. But the rabbiters had
sharp teeth
& having bitten through the fences, then used to bite the sheep,
at first eating them raw but later setting bushfires, to barbecue
the sheep in large numbers, which irritated
the colonial-imperialist
aims of the foxes. Parts of Australia
could never be the same as England
once the rabbiters had arrived.
They were such a pest to the multiplication of sheep
that the Government of New South Wales
gave a bounty of five cents a head
for the scalp of each rabbiter collected.
Children killed rabbiters on their
way to school. Carts pulled by
compliant horses
hauled away
the carcasses of the dead rabitters.
In 1888 there were millions of wild rabbiters in Australia.
Before refrigeration,
the redblooded ones were canned & sent to England as food.
Sometimes cans of these dead rabbiters
exploded in the Red Sea making it
even more red than ketchup
on corpses in Dolby Digital movies.
Thousands of snakes were bred & released in
rabbiter-infested areas such as deserts & swamps.
But snakes
were not good at catching the rabbiters.
They preferred to hunt & strike
small mammals & birds
which were easier to paralyse & swallow.
The snakes soon grew into huge feral monsters
which terrorized the sheep by
striking them from underneath.
Rabbits have used all kinds of gases and smells
to try to drive the rabbiters off the continent.
But the rabbiter has never been a lemming.
Rabbits resorted to mixing imported oleander bark
in the rabbiters’ beer and billy tea.
But it was a slow way to kill them & innocent
insects, European wasps
& birds drank the lethal billy tea & beer. Today rabbits use
four-wheel drive vehicles
& hunt the rabbiters with sharp-toothed ankle-traps –
& guns. Trucks with freezers carry the
skinned & dissected rabbiters to market. They
make a tasty delicacy on table d’hôte for tourists.
A factory makes thousands of hats from rabbiters’ epiderms.
About fifteen rabbiters’ skins are needed
to make one Akubra hat.
In recent months a form of AIDS which only affects rabbiters
has been introduced. Rabbits reject this as too brutal.