Central Otago Great Easter Bunny Hunt | |
Status: | Active |
Genre: | Cull |
Date: | Easter |
Frequency: | Annual |
Location: | Alexandra, New Zealand |
First: | 1990s |
Founder Name: | Dave Ramsay |
Participants: | 31 teams (average) |
Activity: | Nuisance wildlife management |
Organised: | Alexandra Lions Club |
Or Sponsors: | --> |
The Central Otago Great Easter Bunny Hunt is an annual rabbit cull held every Easter in and around Alexandra, New Zealand, since the early 1990s. It is organised by Alexandra Lions Club and convened by Dave Ramsay.[1] [2] Central Otago is an area of New Zealand where rabbits are a non-native, invasive, serious problem with no natural predators, and land owners have a legal obligation to control them.[3] In 2016, "the Otago Regional Council budget[ed] 2200 hours a year for biosecurity officers to police this, and in 2013, one landowner was taken to court over excessive rabbits."[4]
"It took only a handful of years for Central Otago’s rabbits to transform from sport into problem. The Acclimatisation Society of Otago released 60 bunnies in 1866, but five years later, its chairman wrote to the Otago Witness pleading for its readers to stop setting rabbits free in the high country: they were eating the land bare." In 1876 New Zealand's Rabbit Nuisance Act was passed.
"Central Otago’s rabbits have long been known simply as ‘the evil’. They've held the title of the region's worst pest since the middle of the 19th century, maintaining it in the face of helicopter hunters, poison-laced carrots, aerial 1080 drops, rabbit-proof fences and biological warfare, in the form of a virus smuggled into the country by farmers in 1997." Additional misguided attempts at controlling the rabbits included releasing ferrets in 1879 even after warnings were made of their effects on bird life. The ferrets devastated the native bird populations and are now hunted pests. In 1885 stoats and weasels were released in another misguided effort, and are also now hunted pests. Reporter Rebekah White described the rabbit damage on "the naked, pockmarked hillside I’m standing on. It looks as though it has been strafed repeatedly, and it’s bereft of plants—just scree and dirt that the breeze occasionally picks up and shifts. A little more time under the rule of rabbits and it’ll be more dune than hill."
Teams generally hunt individually on foot during the day, and from vehicles in groups at night when the rabbits are more plentiful.
Year | Number of Teams | Tally | Winner | Winner's Tally | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
2010 [6] | 39 | 23,064 | SWAT | 2,306 | |
2011 [7] | 47 | 22,904 | Beige Brigade Wolfpack | 1,664 | |
2012 [8] | 36 | 10,424 | Southern Hopper Stoppers | 1,035 | |
2013 [9] | 36 | 18,027 | Hair Raisin' Mutineers | 1,366 | |
2014 [10] | 25 | 7,478 | Wabbit Warriors | 769 | |
2015 [11] | 24 | 8,439 | Down South | 876 | |
2016 [12] | 27 | 10,010 | Down South | 889 | |
2017 | 21 | 8,000+ | |||
2018 [13] | Cancelled: K5 rabbit virus release | ||||
2019 | Cancelled: extreme fire risk | ||||
2020 | Cancelled: COVID-19 | ||||
2021 [14] | 25 | 11,968 | Overkill | 1,185 | |
2022 | |||||
2023[15] | Cancelled: safety concerns |
1. First shooting incident in the event's 23-year history. A 26-year-old Southland man accidentally shot himself while hunting alone on a Queensberry property and was flown to Dunedin Hospital. It was thought he lost his footing while shooting and fell, receiving injuries to his left hand and forehead. The man had surgery overnight and was recovering the next day.
2. Because the hunt was cancelled in 2018, 2019, & 2020 the hunt was expanded from 24 hours to two nights in 2021, running from 8am on Good Friday until noon on Easter Sunday (52 hours).