Vinny O\u2019Loughlin goes out rabbit shooting at night, but he could just as easily do it during the day from his front door in the small South Australian town of Willalooka. \u201cWe\u2019ve got half-a-dozen rabbits in our front yard in the morning when we get out of bed,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
At night \u201cyou can come up over a rise and it is nothing to see 100 rabbits within the next 50 metres\u201d.<\/p>\n
In Melbourne\u2019s outer municipality of Casey, a local school had to relocate their athletics carnival because the oval was riddled with rabbit warrens, and the market gardeners of Cranbourne are in despair seeing crop after crop of seedlings obliterated. \u201cI was elected in November 2024 and [the rabbit problem] was the No.\u20091 issue that people spoke to me about before the election,\u201d says Casey councillor and deputy mayor Michelle Crowther.<\/p>\n
In Junee, southern New South Wales, not even the dead can rest in peace, as rabbits tunnel around and under graves, forcing the local council to close the cemetery to deal with the problem.<\/p>\n
From the Western Australian wheatbelt to southern Queensland, rabbits are causing headaches for local councils and havoc for landowners and farmers. The arsenal of biological control weapons that for decades has kept rabbit numbers in check is dangerously depleted, as a lack of funding slows the research and development needed to keep pace with rabbit reproduction.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not possible to eat our way or shoot our way \u2026 or bait our way out of this problem, and that\u2019s because rabbits breed like rabbits,\u201d says Jack Gough, chief executive of the Invasive Species Council, a national non-government organisation campaigning for action on invasive species. \u201cYou need to be getting well over 80 per cent of the rabbits in an area every year \u2026 and that\u2019s very difficult to achieve with conventional methods of control.\u201d<\/p>\n
Older Australians might recall the worst days of rabbit plagues, when billions swarmed the landscape, gnawing any plant life \u2013 native or introduced \u2013 into the dirt.<\/p>\n
The release of the South American myxoma virus in the 1950s reduced rabbit numbers by more than 90 per cent. Then in 1996, a new virus \u2013 rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus, or calicivirus \u2013 was released, and killed as many as 98 per cent of wild rabbits in some parts of Australia. In both cases, however, rabbits gradually developed resistance. Those original viruses, and the engineered or imported variants developed and released since then, are still out there in the wild, but their mortality rates are now as low as 50 per cent.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have previously observed that the effectiveness of rabbit biocontrols start to wane after approximately 10 to 15 years,\u201d says Dr Tanja Strive, lead rabbit biocontrol research scientist at CSIRO.<\/p>\n
\u201cGiven the exotic RHDV2 [an exotic variant of calicivirus] arrived in Australia around 2014, we are entering the point in the cycle where we may see increases in rabbit numbers again,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
After the initial dramatic success of myxomatosis, it soon became clear the war against rabbits would be a long one, needing sustained and secure investment in research to maintain a pipeline of new strains and varieties of biological control.<\/p>\n
That research effort began in earnest through the Invasive Animals Cooperative Research Centre in 2007 and continued through the Centre for Invasive Species Solutions \u2013 a collaboration of state, territory and federal governments, CSIRO and Meat and Livestock Australia.<\/p>\n
Then in 2022, federal funding for the national Rabbit Biocontrol Pipeline Strategy that began in 2007 came to an end, and the Albanese government has yet to recommit funds to the initiative.<\/p>\n
\u201cMother Nature is very good at exponential growth. It can feel like there\u2019s almost none there and then, overnight, suddenly you\u2019re like, why are\u00a0there rabbits everywhere?\u201d<\/p>\n
Craig Magnussen, chair of Rabbit-Free Australia \u2013 a non-profit working towards the eradication of wild rabbits \u2013 says efforts in the past have been so successful that rabbits have become an \u201cout of sight, out of mind\u201d problem. \u201cThey\u2019ve fallen down a priority list. We\u2019ve found ourselves in a situation where we don\u2019t have assured program funding for research into new biocontrols,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Developing, testing, getting approval for and deploying a new biological control agent is a long-term effort. Tanja Strive says while CSIRO is at the stage of identifying and selecting new virus variants, it can take eight to 10 years for those variants to go through the extensive testing and regulatory processes required to release them safely and effectively.<\/p>\n
Her own research on genetic biocontrols, or gene drives, could also take decades to deliver field-ready solutions, \u201cwhich means there is a need for further virus releases until this technology is possibly ready for deployment in rabbits in the longer term\u201d, she says.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for the federal Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry says the department currently spends $1.2 million on wild rabbit control, which includes just over $1 million in funding for CSIRO research into rabbit biocontrol and to monitor existing biocontrol agents.<\/p>\n
Jack Gough argues that\u2019s not nearly enough. The first five years of the multi-pronged, long-term strategy for rabbit biocontrol that was endorsed by the federal government\u2019s own Environment and Invasives\u00a0Committee in 2024 would cost about $15 million.<\/p>\n
The $1 million the federal government currently spends on rabbit biocontrol is also due to lapse in June, and the Invasive Species Council is concerned the federal government has not given guarantees that even that funding will be renewed.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is a proposal on the table that needs funding,\u201d says Gough. \u201cSomeone needs to fund this as a national priority, because every day we wait is a day rabbits are breeding up, and is a day we\u2019re delaying when we\u2019ve got that next tool in the toolbox.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s also a lack of spending on national surveys that would give a clearer picture of rabbit numbers. \u201cOther than citizen science and people using RabbitScan \u2013 which is a free desktop tool or app on your smartphone to map rabbits \u2013 we have no national data,\u201d says Heidi Kleinert, the national feral rabbit management coordinator at the Centre for Invasive Species Solutions, whose position is also federally funded.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s really concerning, because if you don\u2019t know how big the problem is, if you don\u2019t measure it, you can\u2019t tackle it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The lack of highly effective biocontrol measures also puts the pressure on local government, landowners, farmers and even households to deal with the rabbit problem at\u00a0their own expense.<\/p>\n
For farmers, that means large-scale measures such as baiting, trapping and manually ripping up rabbit warrens. \u201cWarren-ripping is great, and it\u2019s worked terrifically well out here,\u201d says David Lord, a wool producer in Broken Hill. He adds, however, that \u201cthe cost of ripping a hectare of land for rabbits was about the same price as purchasing new land\u201d.<\/p>\n
Vinny O\u2019Loughlin does warren-ripping in South Australia as a contractor. He says farmers are doing the hard work to eradicate rabbits from their own land, only to have them repopulate from nearby council land. \u201cWe\u2019ve got dirt roads down here \u2013 council roads \u2013 where the rabbits have undermined the roads, so that the roads have collapsed in along the hole,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Rabbits are also invading urban and peri-urban areas. \u201cWe don\u2019t have a great handle on the science behind that increase in their presence as a peri-urban pest,\u201d says Rabbit-Free Australia\u2019s Magnussen, adding that \u201cit\u2019s a really challenging environment to try and undertake best practice control\u201d. Baits can\u2019t be used because there\u2019s a risk pets will eat them; ripping isn\u2019t practical for a sports field or backyard; and shooting is out of the question.<\/p>\n
Not only are biological controls the best option for urban areas, they can also eradicate rabbits from sensitive environmental areas where conventional control methods aren\u2019t practical or ideal.<\/p>\n
Michelle Crowther\u2019s municipality of Casey includes the Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne and the Dandenong Ranges. \u201cWe have the southern brown bandicoot here, and rabbits are competing for habitat and food,\u201d she says. \u201cIt impacts so many things that you don\u2019t think of.\u201d<\/p>\n
The latest estimates from 2025 put the national rabbit population near 200\u00a0million, but a lot can happen in a year. \u201cIn perfect breeding conditions, they can breed every 28 days,\u201d Heidi Kleinert says. \u201cThat means that if you had two rabbits, you\u2019d have 184 rabbits in 18 months\u2019 time.\u201d<\/p>\n
The problem with invasive species, Jack Gough says, is that no one cares until it\u2019s too late. \u201cMother Nature is very good at exponential growth,\u201d he says. \u201cIt can feel like there\u2019s almost none there and then, overnight, suddenly you\u2019re like, why are there rabbits everywhere? That\u2019s the nature of them.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
\n April 4, 2026 as “Rabbit redux”.<\/p>\n
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