It isn't only rabbits who will suffer from the new surge of myxomatosis

Caught in the centre of a soundless field While hot inexplicable hours go by What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed?

You seem to ask.

‘Myxomatosis’ by Philip Larkin Aldbourne, Wiltshire.

I saw the rabbit, a young doe, 50 yards or so down the path. ‘Look, ‘ I said to the kids, ‘a bunny.’ But even as I said the words, I knew that this would be a problematic encounter. The rabbit just sat there, its usual hair-trigger response to approaching danger apparently nullified.

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‘A fairly stupid bunny, ‘ my oldest son pronounced, as we clumped closer to the creature and it still declined to bolt. ‘A very ill bunny, ‘ I told him. It didn’t move either when I stood over it, just remained aloof to the world, its eyes swollen and weeping, a hopeless bunny rabbit. It was in the last stages of its illness, wracked by pneumonia and fever, convulsed with lassitude, probably blind, maybe deaf too. What I should have done was kick it to death right there, but my getting a divorce was traumatic enough for the kids. I couldn’t inflict something like that on them, too. Beyond the line of oak and beech trees lining our path was open ground, above which a wake of buzzards soared and mewed;

there were at least a dozen of them. They’d sort it all out quickly enough. After all, it’s probably why they were there.

Myxomatosis is a foul and cruel disease, bad enough even when you don’t have to explain its filthy human provenance to the kids. The suspicion right now is that it might be back with a vengeance. Our wild rabbit populations fluctuate hugely year on year but it is generally agreed that the creature has been in very sharp decline indeed over the past 15 years or so. Haemorrhagic fever took its toll in the early 1990s; now something else is responsible. Habitat loss, for sure - but myxomatosis is the likely culprit.

Anecdotally, more and more cases are being reported in an ever-expanding breadth of southern England. The truth is that the disease never went away; the suspicion is that it is changing for the worse.

Myxomatosis was introduced to Australia first in 1938 and then, more devastatingly, in 1950 as a deliberate attempt to extinguish the alien rabbit population. A tough little virus specific only to rabbits and posing no danger to any other creature, least of all humans, it could be easily transmitted by fur mites, mosquitoes, rabbit fleas and the like. It did its job pretty well, reducing the rabbit population from 600 million to 100 million within a couple of years. The Australians continue their battle with the rabbits and have more recently used the haemorrhagic fever virus to do so. In 1952, meanwhile, a French idiot, an arse, a member of the French Academy of Medicine, Dr Paul Armand-Delille, deliberately introduced myxomatosis to rabbits on his private estate in France; somehow the virus got loose - Armand-Delille blamed poachers - and Europe’s rabbit population was soon stricken. Armand-Delille became a hero to French farmers and was honoured by the French government, rather than being suspended by his testicles over a vat of boiling oil, as my son said he believed to be the appropriate reward, once I’d told him all this stuff. By 1953 it had reached the UK, the first case discovered on a farm near Edenbridge in Kent. Supposedly no human involvement, save that of the hapless Armand-Delille, had resulted in its appearance in Britain and at first the Ministry of Agriculture attempted to contain the outbreak. To no great effect, however. Within a year or so, 99.5 per cent of Britain’s wild rabbits were rotting in the fields, or standing prone and listless, with bulging eyes, by the side of the road, waiting for an agreeable-looking truck to come along. An entire population virtually wiped out. The spread of the disease was encouraged by farmers back then: they would take diseased rabbits and stuff them in warrens not yet afflicted. One would hope that they are not doing the same sort of thing now, it being illegal these days.

The present increase in myxomatosis may be down to that ubiquitous culprit for everything, global warming. Anecdotally, again, there are more mosquitoes buzzing around in Britain than before and they are a perfectly respectable vector for myxomatosis.

Author: Liddle, Rod