CHAPTER III. 



INJURY TO CROPS AND MEANS OF PROTECTION. 



INJURY TO GRAIN, ORCHARDS, ETC. 



With the settlement of the West tlie jack rabbit has found that 

 several cultivated crops furnish food which is better and more easily- 

 obtained than the wild plants on which it formerly fed, a fact that is 

 too often demonstrated by the ravages committed in orchards and 

 vineyards. Like tlie cottontail, it seldom ignores a neighboring alfalfa 

 field or vegetable garden, and if unmolested can do a surprising 

 amount of damage. Melons, cabbage, carrots, alfalfa, cotton, sweet- 

 potato vines, young grain, grapevines, and trees sutler most frequently 

 from its visits. The damage is most severe, however, in the young 

 orchard set in newly broken ground, for here, deprived of its ordinary 

 food by the cultivation of the land, the rabbit is forced to seek a new 

 supply, and iinds it in the tender bark of the young trees. A single 

 aninuil can girdle a large number of trees in a short time, and will often 

 injure them so seriously that part of the orchard has to be replanted. 

 It destroys both the foliage and bark of young vines, but is especially 

 partial to altalfa an<l to cabbages. Fortunately, it does not burrow to 

 any great extent, and therefore does not injure the roots of trees or 

 plants, like the pocket gopher. 



It has been estimated tlmt live jack rabbits consume as nuich food 

 as one sheep; thus some idea can be formed of the damage which a 

 few rabbits may do in the course of a single night. Com[)laints of their 

 ravages have been received from numerous corresi)ondents from Texas 

 to Washington, and from Kansas to California. Probably all the spe- 

 cies are injurious, although no positive evidence against Allen's Kabbit 

 is now at hand, simply because so little land in the area which it 

 inhabits happens to be under cultivation. Most of the injury is done 

 by the California Jack Rabbit and the wide-ranging Texan Hare {Lcpus 

 texianus). 



Mr. H. P. Attwater states that jack rabbits are common in Aransas 

 County, Tex., along the Gulf coast, and <lo so nuich damage that many 

 of the smaller truck farms are protected by rabbit-proof fences. In the 

 northern part of the same State Mr. W. J. Crowley, of Grapevine, Tar- 

 rant County, reports that they cause considerable injury to grain, and 

 in fields of wheat, oats, and cotton often cut paths 12 inches wide and 

 300 or -100 yards in length, an«l destroy patches as large as an onliiiary 

 sized room. Mr. A. V'ogt wrote from Willow Point, in the neighboring 

 county of Wise, under date of December 6, 1889: "The damage done 

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