Villena grape-eating rabbits out of control
Out-of-season hunting on weekends authorised
VILLENA wine producers and farmers are desperate: their vineyards are suffering from a plague of rabbits that are eating their grapes.
To alleviate the problem, the regional environment department is allowing hunters to hunt rabbits on Saturdays and Sundays, outside the official hunting season.
Villena agricultural councillor José Tomas Molina explained that the reason the rabbit population has grown so much is because they no longer have many natural predators in the area. He said the rabbits are also damaging local archaeological sites including the Cabezo Redondo Bronze Age ruins in Villena.
Agost, Montforte del Cid and Novelda are also suffering from the same plague of rabbits.
The rabbit population has increased steadily over the past 10 years and all attempts by the regional government, town halls and hunters to reduce their numbers have failed. The rabbits not only eat the grape crops, they also eat into the vines, in some cases destroying them totally, which means they have to be pulled up and replaced.
In some areas, they have munched their way through 70% of this year's grape crops, while last year a vineyard in Novelda had all its crops eaten by rabbits.
Grape producers are fed up of fighting this losing battle against the rabbits, who have taken advantage of the AVE high-speed railway which goes through the area to burrow into the sides of the embankments and raise their litters a few metres from the grape vines.
During 2016, the regional government allowed year-round hunting of rabbits, but this did not seem to make much difference to their population. Some farms are now fully fenced in to prevent rabbits getting in, but many still manage to burrow under the fences. At sundown on unfenced farms, dozens of rabbits can be seen frolicking amongst the grape vines.
With the bad weather at the beginning of the year, the farmers had high hopes that the burrows would be flooded, re- sulting in a drop in the population, but this has not been the case. In fact, they say there seems to be more of the creatures than ever.
The regional agricultural department has recommended that farmers do not allow cuttings and trimmings to accumulate, and that they should keep the borders of their fields clean to discourage the rabbits from borrowing underneath them. Meetings with grape producers and hunters are ongoing to try and come up with a suitable solution to the problem.
A special committee will also be formed to calculate the cost of the damage caused so far and to evaluate the effectiveness of current and future measures to control the rabbit population.
Spanish authorities cannot do what they did in Australia, where they declared biological war on the rabbits by releasing a deadly haemorrhagic virus, as Spain has an important farm-bred rabbit meat industry that would suffer horrifically if the virus got out of control.