RABBIT SHOOTING. 53 



thousand. Such a monotonous massacre may be all very well in 

 Australia, where the conies have become a plague ; but to be able to 

 kill such a multitude in any part of Great Britain implies an injury 

 beforehand done of malice prepense to the tenant and his crops. 

 In no part of these islands will rabbits increase and multiply abnor- 

 mally. Perhaps the damp climate and its vicissitudes of cold and 

 heat, damp and dry, prevent them ; or vermin — to wit, hawks, 

 stoats, weasels, foxes, and cats run wild — :with human poachers, 

 check their over-increase. Of late years Sir William Harcourt, 

 with his Ground Game Act, has taken rank, as a check upon the 

 multiplication of rabbits, with the stoat, the polecat, and the 

 poacher. Certain it is that to be able to shoot a thousand 

 rabbits in a day over a thousand acres of land implies their over- 

 preservation, and over-preservation means that the normal balance 

 of nature is not preserved, and that something, sooner or later, will 

 go amiss. 



It is only for the benefit of the quite unsporting or Cockney 

 reader that it is necessary to observe that the rabbit spends over 

 one hundred hours every week under-ground, and that he emerges 

 from his burrow more by night than by day. Consequently, the 

 night poacher sees more of him than the legitimate sportsman by 

 daylight. As rabbits are not much abroad while the sun is up, it is 

 necessary when a rabbit "shoot" is intended to get him to leave 

 his burrow and lie out in the fields and hedge-rows. The common 

 way to do this has been, till recently, for the keeper to run a ferret 

 through the burrows at night when the rabbit is not at home. The 

 smell of the ferret is repugnant — as well it may be — to the keen 

 nose of the rabbit, and he will not willingly re-enter the hole while 

 the ferret's taint still lingers. This plan has its objections : where 



