Q: What education campaign for children are these the images for?
a) A promotion for responsible pet ownership?
b) Lessons on the appropriate care of pocket pets?
c) A drive to improve rabbit adoptions?
If you answered ‘none of the above’ and instead said this was an in-school campaign to teach kids about methods used to kill rabbits as pest animals – you’d be right! And it is likely you have already heard about RabbitScan, the new initiative of the national Rabbit Management Advisory Group (RMAG);
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RabbitScan is a nation-wide challenge for community and schools to help scientists map where rabbits are, by asking people to ‘scan’ their landscape (school, farm, parkland, roadside reserves, ovals etc) for signs of rabbits and their damage, and to load their results online – during RabbitScan Month in May 2009.
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But it’s not just about counting poo pellets and chomped bushes; this group have also put together a Teachers Project Kit for school children outlining exactly how to exterminate Bugs. But it’s ok they’re not animals…. they’re rabbits.
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Rabbit Control
“It is not the number destroyed but the number remaining that is the problemâ€â€™
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Hey, remember when those kids threw that kitten onto the train tracks and we all wrung our hands and said ‘how could kids have so little empathy for a living, breathing creature?’
While we’re trying to encourage children to be compassionate towards animals; to care for them appropriately and to treat them with kindness and all that silly stuff, the Rabbit Information teachers workbook is also spreading a message – outlining some of the more popular techniques for killing small furry mammals;
poisoning, fumigation, biological control
ripping (using machinery to destroy the warrens and kill the rabbits at the same time)
explosion devises (sic), ferreting
and of course
shooting and trapping.
So remember kids – treat your pets with compassion.
Play nicely with your rabbit
unless it’s a wild rabbit
(then it’s perfectly ok to explode them).
