In China, rabbits are a delicacy on the table, and they are almost desperate, and hares have become protected animals. There are a total of 9 species of hares living on the mainland, of which three belong to the second-level protected animals, namely Tarim rabbit, Hainan rabbit and snow rabbit; The remaining 6 species, grass rabbit, South China rabbit, plateau rabbit, Northeast rabbit, Southwest rabbit, and Northeast black rabbit, belong to the three animals and are also protected by the state.
What are three animals? It is a terrestrial wild animal that is beneficial or has important economic and scientific research value. There is a difference between animal protection and secondary protection, and secondary protection is that no one can be killed, and killing is a crime; Three animals can not be killed at will, a small amount of hunting is illegal, hunting more than 20 is a crime.
It seems that the Chinese rabbit is now very happy and protected. And the Australian rabbit, not only is it not protected, but there are also prizes for hunting, why is there such racial discrimination? Let's take a look.
Australia's unique biological system
Surrounded by the sea, between the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean, Australia is the only country in the world whose territory covers a continent, which is Australia. With an area of 7.692 million square kilometers, Australia ranks sixth in the world.
50 million years ago, Australia was still connected to other continental plates, and with the movement of the Earth's plates, the Australian plates gradually drifted into a separate continent, isolated from other continents. As a result, the flora and fauna of this continent formed a reproductive isolation from other continents and evolved into a biological system with Australian characteristics.
According to statistics, Australia has 378 species of mammals, 828 species of birds, 300 species of lizards, 140 species of snakes, 2 species of crocodiles, more than 4,000 species of fish, and 50 species of marine mammals. These mammals, reptiles and frogs, 80% of which are unique to Australia, form their own evolutionary chains and food chains.
In the competition for survival of mammals from other continents, marsupial mammals are basically extinct, while Australia has retained 55 species of kangaroos and wallabies alone. The vast majority of these animals are very docile, and just look at the koala's cute look, you can see how kind they are.
Even the more aggressive kangaroos never bite, at most with their hooves on a few legs. The vast majority of these animals are vegetarian animals, eating grass and leaves as if they were living in paradise. Everything is because of people, especially outsiders, that the living environment of these animals has changed.
These outsiders are the colonizers
According to modern genetic sequencing studies, all humans in the world are of African Homo sapiens origin, and 100,000 years ago, these African Homo sapiens began to migrate around the world, and a group of people arrived in Australia 40,000 years ago to become indigenous people here. These people, like the animals here, have always been in a primitive state of life due to their isolation from the world.
In the history of some parts of the world, human beings have undergone rapid development in the history of thousands of years, especially in recent centuries, Europe has developed with the industrial revolution and capitalist revolution, and explorers in some developed countries have begun a new round of migration in search of new continents.
In 1606, the Dutchman William Jens became the first outsider to land in Australia, believing that he discovered the continent and named it "New Netherland". But he didn't seem to be resident, and he didn't hear from him as soon as he left. In 1770, the British navigator Captain Cook discovered the east coast of Australia, named it "New South Wales", and declared the territory to belong to Britain.
In this way, the British began to come here one after another, and the first to use this barbaric place as a place of exile for prisoners, because here the prisoners could not escape with their wings. On 18 January 1788, a fleet of 6 ships, led by Captain Philip, landed in Australia, with a total of 1530 men, including 736 prisoners.
These men announced the creation of the first British colonial precinct in Port Jackson, Australia, on January 26, which became Sydney, and January 26 became Australia's national day. With the increase in personnel, people gradually moved inland from Sydney, and the colonial area gradually expanded to all of Australia.
In 1859, a key figure came, and it was his arrival that almost changed the entire ecology of Australia, or caused the Australian ecology to be devastated. This man, named Austin, was sent by the British to serve as a warden on this isolated island where criminals were held, and his biggest hobby was hunting.
A nephew in Austin saw his uncle suffering in the distance, so he mailed him 20 rabbits and asked him to mend his body. Austin did not eat the rabbits, but kept them in captivity on his own farm. Rabbits reproduce quickly, especially 5 of these 20 rabbits are from Europe, a female rabbit can produce 18 to 30 cubs a year, and a small rabbit cub only needs 6 months to mature sexually and begin to give birth again.
Austin was so excited to see more and more rabbits breeding that he used them as live targets in his own ranch. But his hunting was far from catching up with the breeding rate of rabbits, and in just six years, there were tens of thousands of rabbits, and the Austin ranch had been crowded with rabbits and nibbled on them, and these rabbits did not eat, and they all burrowed through the barriers and spread outward.
Freed rabbits joyfully jump in australia's vast grasslands, where they have no natural enemies, just like living in paradise, only kangaroos and koalas foolishly watching their children and grandchildren more and more. These rabbits spread around the perimeter at a speed of 130 kilometers per year.
In Austin's time, there was nothing wrong with this, and both the natives and colonists seemed to have a lot more food. But within a few decades, by the end of the 19th century, it was already rampant. I don't know what year Austin died, so I don't know if he saw the consequences of the catastrophe he had caused.
By the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the proliferation of hares had become a nightmare for Australians. But some sources do not attribute this charge to Austin alone, but to the influx of colonists who began to pour into Australia at the end of the 18th century, and more and more colonists had many people carrying rabbits, and Austin was just one of them.
Why don't Australians eat all the rabbits?
By the 1920s, these rabbits had multiplied to a terrifying 10 billion, knowing that australia's population was just over 5 million at that time, and one person had to deal with 2,000 rabbits! So, some people say won't they eat it? This kind of statement is as stupid as the ancient stupid emperor who said, "Why don't you eat meat?"
When the official reported to him that the starving people were starving all over the field, he felt strange and asked: If there is no food, why don't you drink broth?
In fact, Australians still eat a lot of rabbits, and before the rabbit flood is shown, Australians have been delighted for a long time for a delicious meal on the table. And during the period of the world famine, Australians were spared from hunger because of rabbit meat, and some also made a fortune by selling rabbit meat and rabbit skins.
But there are too many rabbits to eat. To know that a female rabbit gives birth to twenty or thirty a year, and the mother of the female rabbit has to be born and raised in 6 months, who can calculate how much a female rabbit breeds in a year? What is the number of two, five, ten years?
A person eats one a day, 5 million people, including the elderly, weak, women and children, eat only 1.8 billion rabbits a year, and how many rabbits will breed in a year? Therefore, there is no way to eat it, even if there are 1.4 billion people in China today, they can't finish eating. Of course, if 1.4 billion people go to eat, eating one a day can only be eliminated, but this way of eating is impossible.
These desperately breeding rabbits arbitrarily nibble on Australia's rich green resources, and even eat the roots, resulting in the disappearance of patches of vegetation, desertification and desertification of successive lands, rabbits punching holes everywhere and causing the land to be loose, and under the rain, soil erosion landslides occur frequently.
Australia's honest and cute indigenous animals are even more miserable, encroached upon by rabbits to destroy living resources and space, making them homeless and hungry, and declining day by day. The rat kangaroo is Australia's oldest and smallest marsupial, which was still found all over the Australian continent in the early 19th century, but after the rabbit flood, it was declared a sad extinction in the last century; Other kangaroos, emus, platypus, etc. also plummeted.
The growth rate of rabbits has not diminished at all, and at one point it has grown to 18 billion. As a result, it has aroused panic and attention from the Australian government.
Thus, Australia opened the prelude to the century-old human rabbit war
At the beginning, it was still a people's war, a nationwide mobilization, rewarding and encouraging the people of the whole country to hunt and kill hares, and people used various means, even to the extreme, hunting, traps, poisoning, burning, etc., but still could not stop the spread of hares. Later, the government increased the bounty, with a maximum bounty of up to £25,000.
To know that 1 pound sterling contains 7.32 grams of gold, in that era, the average worker's annual salary was only more than ten or twenty pounds, and 25,000 pounds was a huge fortune, which attracted many people around the world to try. Even the famous French microbiologist Pasteur sent three assistants with a tube of chicken cholera bacteria in an attempt to eliminate the hares by infecting the chicken cholera bacteria.
Unfortunately, because the hare is not a chicken and is not sensitive to the bird cholera fungus, it failed.
Then the government suddenly opened its mind and thought of a way to think it was a brilliant way to introduce rabbits, the natural enemies of foxes, and let the foxes eliminate them. At first, there was some effect, the foxes had never seen so many rabbits, and they had eaten for a while. But soon, the foxes found that there was a lot of food that could be eaten in Australia, and that the native animals in Australia could run without rabbits, and it was easier to hunt, so they no longer had any interest in rabbits.
Rabbits were not eliminated, but instead attracted wolves into the house, bringing another major scourge to Australian indigenous animals, in order not to make those vulnerable groups in Australia extinct, people had to take up shotguns to eliminate foxes, and the plan to introduce "mercenaries" foxes to eliminate rabbits ended in failure.
The government seems to have exhausted its skills, and after 7 years of effort, the government has built an iron fence network running through the north and south, imitating the ancient Chinese method of building the Great Wall to resist aggression, in an attempt to stop the rabbits in the east to protect the fertile land in the west. With a total length of more than 3,000 kilometers, this iron fence network is the longest iron mesh project in the world.
But the burrowing rabbits were completely dismissive of this seemingly unbreakable project, and they quickly broke through tunnel warfare (drilling holes), and coupled with the corrosion of the natural environment, these iron nets were soon full of holes and useless. This huge encirclement and suppression project failed again, and the Australian government, discouraged, took a series of offensives in a hurry.
These offensives included fire and bombing and poisoning, and even used Bombers from World War II against the Japanese, but instead of bombs, they dropped poison gas bombs. Government personnel used bombers to airdrop thousands of poison gas bombs in the sparsely populated rabbit main area. But the gases killed some of the rabbits and left many other animals and livestock in the limelight.
If you continue to do it, you will end up with it, and this method has finally failed. Later, the government strictly prohibited the breeding of rabbits without permission, otherwise they would be severely punished and even face imprisonment. These measures have had no effect on the wild breeding of hares, which are still raging in Australia.
Therefore, rabbits will not only bite people when they are in a hurry, but also force a large group of humans to be unable to live. If we continue to develop in this way, it seems that Australia will soon become a place that is not suitable for human production. But there was no end to the road, and finally a ray of light appeared.
In the end, it is the biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction that are effective
By the 1950s, biologists had thought of Pasteur's use of chicken cholera to eliminate rabbits, but this time the weapon was not chicken cholera bacteria, but a myxomavirus imported from the Americas, which was transmitted by mosquitoes, sensitive and deadly only to European hares, and harmless to humans and other animals.
Soon, the effects of the virus were apparent, with hares in some areas being killed by the virus 99 percent. But one of the characteristics of virus transmission is that it will gradually weaken, and rabbits will also produce antibodies, coupled with this mosquito-borne virus, there are few mosquitoes in arid areas, and it is difficult to work.
As a result, the Australian government introduced an RHD virus that can cause bleeding disease in rabbits in 1995, which relies on flies to spread and is also effective for rabbits in arid areas, and the disaster caused by rabbits has finally been controlled. But the rabbit is still not destroyed, antibodies continue to be produced in the rabbit group, and the Australian rabbit coexists with the virus.
At present, the total number of rabbits in Australia is still around 600 million, and the density is distributed in different regions.
Just a few years ago, scientists found that australian rabbits themselves carry a natural cup virus, which has a certain immunity to the RHD virus and is harmless to rabbits, which may be the natural vaccine formed by rabbits using poison to attack poison.
Therefore, the human-rabbit war is still not over, although the human force is very strong, but the ability to punish nature is still insufficient or even weak, the only thing that can be avoided is to conform to the laws of nature, do not die by yourself, in order to better avoid disasters.
Lessons from the Australian rabbit disaster ~ the dangers of species invasion
The lesson of the Australian rabbit is the consequence of human failure to follow the laws of nature. In a state of reproductive isolation, species evolution has its own chains and laws, and the arrival of an alien species will upset this balance and lead to ecological disasters, and there is no shortage of such examples in the world.
For example, in order to eliminate the lake grass and clean water body, the United States introduced 8 species of freshwater fish from Asia, and later flooded and seriously endangered the safety of local aquatic animals and plants; European hairy crab invasion flooding; Brazilian turtles and crayfish have also flooded after coming to China from the Americas.
However, there are many Chinese, there are many foodies, the food culture has a long history, crayfish, Brazilian turtles do not seem to have any big waves, but just to satisfy people's taste buds. In particular, crayfish has become the most popular supper, so that many people have to put down their mobile phones for half a day. If it weren't for the fact that the Chinese people love the delicacy of crayfish so much and let it breed, I would be a little afraid to think about it.
In addition to animals, the harm of foreign plant invasion is also very serious. For example, China introduced water hyacinth to control water pollution, and as a result, the crazy growth not only blocked the river, but also endangered the safety of aquatic animals; The United States began to introduce Chinese kudzu, just to decorate the garden, and later the field cultivation lost control, encroaching on and destroying a large number of farmland and forests.
At present, all countries pay enough attention to species invasions, so there is a strict inspection system for the transit of fresh goods, animals and plants must be quarantined, and there are strict restrictions on imported varieties. But it is difficult to prevent it, because some invasions are not man-made, especially plant seeds, which not only fly, but also drift, and various birds will also act as brokers, bringing many seeds across the ocean to the other side of the ocean.
According to statistics, China has 515 species of invasive plants in 72 families and 285 genera, 291 species have been confirmed, and among the 100 most threatening alien species in the world released by the "World Conservation Union", 50 species have been found in China, becoming one of the countries most threatened by the invasion of alien plants.
As many as 6075 species of invasive plants are observed in various countries around the world.
Therefore, strictly controlling the invasion of alien species is a difficult task for human beings to protect themselves. Will human beings eventually be able to maintain the ecology of the earth so that they can continue for a long time, and how long can they eventually continue? Welcome to the discussion, thanks for reading.
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