Rabbit Killers
Fred Norman with his cow, Brindle, about 1930
Rabbits quickly spread after being introduced for food and sport at various sites in New Zealand in the 1830s and 1840s. Rabbits were sighted in Wānaka in 1868 and rabbit shooting on the Lake Wānaka islands was advertised as a tourist activity. The Central Otago rabbit population grew to plague proportions by the mid- 1870s and rabbits were a major pest, devastating pasture meant for livestock which combined with depressed prices for wool and meat forced some farming families off the land.
On the other hand, rabbits also provided employment and income, through demand for their meat and skins.
In an interview recorded about 1980, Charles Norman recalls rabbiting over winter with his oldest brother in the 1920s at Mt Albert Station. It had taken 2 years for them to perfect their poison “recipe” of 1 oz strychnine to 26lb of boiled oats, but it was effective! They could lay poison and pick up 7-800 rabbits in the morning, and together they could skin 2-3,000 rabbits in a day at a phenomenal rate of 80-100 rabbits an hour.
In 1923 rabbit skins were fetching £10 per 100. People flocked to the area at the prospect of good income, “even doctors and lawyers from Dunedin”, with Charles seeing “more population in Makarora up to that time than I have ever seen in my life.”
The newcomers wanted “…all the information out of you that they could get, the one thing and another. We wouldn’t tell them right mixes for poison.” Instead, Charles’ brother would put a teaspoon full of cochineal in a small essence bottle, “…fill it up with water, and sell it to all these new townsfolk for 10 bob a bottle… He didn’t tell them they didn’t have the right mixtures or anything, which he knew they didn’t. He said you won’t get a rabbit unless you use this stuff. Well, they were buying it worse than hot cakes.”
His brother would take people to a place with 40 or 50 rabbits and show them how to feed out clean oats three times before poisoning. He “always took his own poison…they’d mix theirs… and they’d be down at the line at daylight in the morning, there’d be 40-50 rabbits lying about 2 or 3 yards apart.”
“They die on the line when you use strychnine if you’ve got it right. And he said that you won’t get a rabbit unless you use this stuff. Well, you might as well have poured a cup of tea into it for all the effect it had. He got 10 bob a bottle for 10 anyway…oh cripes!”
