Feral rampage (GNW 31/8/09: monologue)

Feral pests are running wild, causing over 620 million dollars worth of damage to Australian agriculture. Topping the list are birds, although many of those are native species, and therefore not subject to visa restrictions.

Feral pests are causing over 600 million dollars worth of damage to farms, whether it be through digging holes, devouring food, or just whipping around their dreadlocks. / or wanton fire-twirling. / or just the constant fire-twirling and bongos.

The research was launched by the Invasive Animals Co-operative Research Centre chief executive, Professor Tony Peacock. Professor Peacock? Now if he’s not a feral pest himself, he’s almost certainly murdered someone in the drawing room with the candelabra.

And even worse than the feral animals are the native birds depleting our berry and nut crops – we’re not even allowed to shoot them or fill them with disease!

Pah! Native birds – what right do they have to decimate our introduced plants? It’s just not right.

Due to the gloriously green farmland and vegie patches, the rabbits are learning to live with the plague of feral humans.

Rabbits threaten 75 endangered native species. But then so do humans, and no-one’s suggesting we wipe them out. Well, apart from the rabbits.

They’re trying to develop a new strain of calicivirus. Or at least some sort of “rabbit flu”.

Rabbits are becoming resistant to calicivirus. Surely there’s some sort of toad we can introduce?

Clearly, we need to start eating less beef and more rabbit. Oh that’s right, except we’ve filled them all with disease.

Looks like we should lay off the cane-toads for a while and start bashing in the heads of all the fluffy wuffy bunnikins!

Sure, rabbits are fluffy wuffy widdle cutesy-pies, but we really need to BASH IN THEIR HEADS.

Even feral pigs cause over 9 million dollars worth of damage per year. And that flu solution seems to have backfired somewhat. / And unfortunately swine flu just gives them a slight cough.

But how hard could it be to get rid of rabbits? Surely all we need to do is take away their children, introduce alcohol and petrol-sniffing into their communities, and they’ll be wiped out in no time.

But how hard could it be to get rid of rabbits? After all, we found it pretty easy to wipe out the indigenous people.

There really need to be more culls of introduced species, starting with the most destructive one of all – white Australians.