We are trying a new tactic in the war of the rabbits. A friend of a friend, who is a pest controller, has lent us a couple of rabbit traps. The idea of trapping occurred to me after seeing a pile of traps in the friend's garage, which he had on loan from his friend. I was quite prepared to buy my own until I looked at some on Amazon and began to worry about the door mechanism, and whether they would slam shut on the cat's tail if he decided to investigate. A previous cat lost his tail after a window dropped on it. I sought the friend's advice on tails, and whether traps worked on wily adult rabbits and not just gauche youngsters, as some Amazon reviews suggested they didn't. This resulted in the offer of the loan of the traps, for which I was grateful, and the suggestion that it would be much easier to show me how they worked than try and explain it by email.
The pest controller and his wife dropped them off this morning, on their way back from somewhere else. Seen in 3D reality rather than on the Amazon website it was clear that they would not hurt Our Ginger, should he choose to explore. They are made of very lightweight steel, and the door is not spring loaded but just drops down under gravity. It is held open by a thin metal prop resting on an inclined plate, and in theory any rabbit that goes inside will tread the plate flat, releasing the prop. The traps don't look particularly inviting, and I'm not sure the cat would go inside, but you never know with cats. They are cardboard box fetishists, but a cage trap is not so inviting and enclosed as a box.
I asked the pest controller what the best thing was to use as bait, and he said carrots generally worked. The Systems Administrator asked our friend the same question last night, and he replied that what I needed to do was pull up whatever plant the rabbits were eating and put it in the trap. Ha ha. The rabbits are even less in my good books than they were before since I discovered a couple of days ago that they had bitten through all the stems but one of the Abelia x grandiflora that I bought at the Great Dixter plant fair. They hadn't even eaten the bitten stems, just left them lying on the ground around the plant. I made a wire cage to protect the poor denuded remains, but it confirmed that the rabbits really did have to go.
Our friend warned us that the rabbits wouldn't go in straight away while the traps were new and strange, but were likely to after a while once they'd got used to them. They should already be used to things appearing and disappearing around the garden, like the wheelbarrow, buckets, step ladder, rake and pick axe, so I'm hoping that the traps will appear like just another thing and the rabbits will not divine their sinister intent. Though our intent is not as sinister as it could be. The Systems Administrator did not like the idea of executing them at point blank range in cold blood, and nor would I, so the plan if we ever catch one is to release it at the far end of the wood, beyond the beehives. This confirms that we are at heart soft city folk who only live in the countryside for the big garden and to gawp at birds, since the pest controller's wife was saying encouragingly that we'd soon have a freezer full.
We saw our neighbour for lunch today, who requested that we didn't release any rabbits down at his end of the farm. He pursued one in his garden into a bush and walloped at it with a spade, and chased another off with a broom, to the amazement of his daughter who hadn't seen him run that fast for some time. They do that to you, rabbits.
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