Where are Twain’s immoral cats?

Mark Twain visited Southland in 1895 and it later prompted him to write about disrespected rabbits and indulged cats. ‘‘In New Zealand the rabbit plague began in Bluff,’’ he wrote. ‘‘The man who introduced the rabbit there was banqueted and lauded; but they would hang him now, if they could get him.’’

The author of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer was struck by the contrast between England, where the natural enemies of the rabbit, be they predators or poachers, were detested and persecuted, and New Zealand where a cat caught with a rabbit would attract no rebuke.

‘‘In England the poacher is watched, tracked, hunted – he dare not show his face. In

Bluff the cat, the weasel, the stoat and the mongoose go up and down, whither they will, unmolested.’’

Skipping lightly past the question of whatever happened to the Bluff mongoose population, we should instead record the extent to which the writer fretted about the indulgence of cats’ predatory instincts.

‘‘This is a sure way to undermine the moral fabric of a cat,’’ Twain warned.

‘‘Thirty years from now there will not be a moral cat in New Zealand. Some say there is none there now.’’

Well here we are and by Twain’s reckoning our cats have been depraved for more than 90 years. Which sounds about right.

And it’s certainly true that rabbits remain a headache well beyond Bluff.

Particularly so at Invercargill’s Eastern Cemetery, where they can arguably be said to be adding a measure of bucolic cuteness, flopsying, mopsying and cottontailing around the place, though they are regrettably also a pestilential presence.

Perhaps it doesn’t go without saying that they cannot dig the much-cited six feet under. But their extensive burrowings have been undermining headstones and monuments, casing subsidence.

So Invercargill City Council decided to shoot them and followup with Magtoxin poisoning.

People’s reactions, particularly online, have varied between distaste, indifference, and none-tooelevated attempts at humour that owe more to Elmer Fudd than Mark Twain. ‘‘Say your pwayers, wabbits’’ and all that.

Purely in terms of scale the rabbit problem does need to be managed.

And we have yet to find measures that aren’t unlovely to varying degrees. None of them represents a permanent fix in any case. Same goes for other periodic debunnying endeavours at Sandy Point and Queen’s Park, let alone the mightily more expansive so-long-tormented terrain of Central Otago.

Even commercial enterprises have failed to live up to ambitions. For a while there, rabbits were canned in Southland and sent to feed our troops overseas.

In a minor masterpiece of marketing, the Cargill branded cans were proudly labelled as containing rabbits that had been ‘‘fed on the finest pastures in the world’’.

The fact is we are not on top of our rabbit problem and haven’t been for a long, long time.

Roll on the day that science produces a solution other than poisoning. That day is coming.

You have to wish success for the chromosomal research that holds promise of a solution that has the doe produce only male offspring.

‘‘Thirty years from now there will not be a moral cat in New Zealand.’’