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I'm surprised that there is not a big enough market for rabbit meat to take care of this problem elegantly. I haven't had rabbit since I was very young but I d

• eesmith 9y ago
  "Elegantly"? Economics and ecology have never worked together in an elegant fashion. We would need orders of magnitude more hunters in order to eradicate rabbits from NZ. That's expensive. Rabbits simply aren't tasty enough to justify that effort. If the market demand for rabbits were to increase drastically, one market response would be to raise more rabbits on rabbit farms, which is cheaper than game rabbit. An increase demand would also result in increased rabbit hunting in Australia. So long as Australian rabbit meat is cheaper than hunting down the last of the NZ rabbits, NZ rabbits will remain in the ecosystem, ready to, ahem, bounce back once the economics changes again. Nor are people stupid. If rabbit hunting brings in huge amounts of money, landowners in NZ are not going to eradicate all of their rabbits for the sake of short-term profits.