Do you know what this is?
On August 3rd, someone named JHA sent a postcard to Paul and Ruth Armstrong saying "see the
rabbits on our farm."
These are the rabbits right here, and this is the crowd that is waiting to club them
to death.
Consider this your one and only trigger warning for the bleak world of rabbit drives that
I'm about to show you.
"During the operation of the pest control project, over 2 million jackrabbits were killed
or captured in 13 counties in western Kansas."
Because this is an historical oddity in which hundreds of thousands of rabbits were herded
and exterminated, and it's still oddly relevant today.
So these children are cheering about fields full of dead rabbits, but before I show you
that, I wanna - has he been there the whole time?
Oh God.
How much of that intro did you hear?
Did you hear the whole intro?
Yeah okay, so, uh this little guy right here this is a jackrabbit, uh which is actually
a hare.
So technically that's different from a rabbit, and when these guys grow up they get a lot
bigger.
And you're gonna get a lot bigger too, nobody's gonna club you to death, no.
Jackrabbits are bigger, some would say less cute — but i would not say less cute, would
I?
No, no I wouldn't.
Black-tailed and white-tailed jackrabbits were the most common jackrabbits in rabbit
drives, and i'm just gonna put you....
Okay, so what exactly was a rabbit drive and why did they do this?
Some rabbit drive veterans described it for the University of Kansas.
You made these huge 40-acre fenced-in areas — pens — and then men, women, and children
in a line, just like in this postcard, moved forward, driving the rabbits forward too.
Sometimes it was in a circle.
Rabbits hopped forward as they kind of condensed and people concentrated all those rabbits
in a big circle and then...
They used clubs, partly for safety, remember they were in a circle so they couldn't be
shooting at each other when they missed a rabbit, but they also used it to conserve
bullets.
These rabbits weren't worth a bullet and there were way too many of them to shoot.
To be clear, some people were horrified by this at the time, too.
This period description shows that while a lot of people were at the rabbit killing party,
not everybody was like, yay this is great!
The author calls it "nauseating to the extreme" and says that some men took "fiendish delight"
while some "tender-hearted persons" saved some alive.
Yet others did think that it was "exciting sport" and sometimes it could be a big party,
where people showed up and sold beer amid the clouds of fur.
Tut whatever the mixed feelings, this was a pretty common thing to happen.
In Nevada, these were so common that jackrabbit's scalps became an accepted medium of exchange:
five scalps for a drink, because the state had a going rate for them.
Why?
So jackrabbits are pretty interesting pest — God, how did you get out?
Okay.
Sorry.
Um, jackrabbits are pretty interesting pests.
Rabbit drives are a response to the ways that they flourish.
If you read literature about their growth, they actually grow in population in drought
periods and their population, it booms.
They don't just survive dusty areas, they kind of do better in them.
So in the Plains, American Indians did rabbit drives forever.
Most people say as a means of food.
American settlers copied the techniques when they started doing a lot of farming.
You can find lots of rabbit drives in desert areas of California, like this one from 1892.
You see, the farmers felt the rabbits were pests because they kept eating their crops,
and the more arid the climate, the more desperate the farmers were to preserve their crops.
In one county in California, for example, in 1888 jackrabbits took out six hundred thousand
dollars worth of crops.
This is in the 1880s.
Remember, this is when a nickel could buy you, like, you know, a Maserati.
Don't, don't think about that too hard.
The man versus jackrabbit dynamic became most intense in Kansas during the dust bowl in
the 1930s.
"The long-eared pest in the absence of other food went so far as to dig alfalfa roots out
of the ground and eat the parts from the young trees."
We normally see dust bowl pictures like these famous ones, but this postcard, it's a dustbowl
picture too.
Dust bowl rabbit drives had even more motivation than those California parties.
They were even more desperate during a Great Depression where the farmland was ruined.
"Some of the rabbits killed in drives early in 1935 were used as food for human consumption,
and in many localities they were skinned and ground for tankage.
Farmers reported that they made excellent feed for chickens and hogs."
This 1958 article, well after the dust bowl, shows that jackrabbits continued to cause
real damage to crops.
These Kansans were slaughtering rabbits, but they weren't just gleeful.
There's probably a little desperation there, too.
So let's be real here, no matter how tough you are the sight of people clubbing tens
of thousands of — "(MUSIC) Last night I felt this storm coming
fast it broke the wall.
Scattered glass across the floor, I know this is the final war.
There's no use trying to pretend."
I want you to go now.
I want you to stay away from content farms like, like mine!
They're only going to hurt you.
Stay.
Stay!
"(MUSIC) Baby, I can't fix that hole, I'm done being the target of your crazy lies.
Do what you can to save your life!"
Uh, where was I?
Clubbing rabbits is shocking, that's what i was saying.
Did rabbit drives work?
A lot of my sources are kind of skeptical.
They seem to say that natural cycles of disease and breeding ended the growth in the rabbit
population, not the rabbit drives.
Um, on the other hand, I can't help but think that, you know, tens of thousands of dead
rabbits in the field had to have some effect on the rabbit population.
But there's kind of two sides to the story.
I think the more important point is that this is not that dissimilar to how we still do
a bit of our conservation today.
I mean, we typically don't have massive jackrabbit drives like this, but state DNRs are constantly
changing bag limits and seasons for hunters based on the conservation aims of the department.
They're limiting how much you can hunt based on how many animals they want out there in
the world.
You want to change the turkey population, change the bag limit.
A great example is when Wisconsin allowed wolf hunting in 2021.
Freakonomics did a great episode about this on their podcast.
In the U.S., at least, we do a lot of our animal regulation through the interests of
individuals and limiting how much or how little they can hunt.
That's not a world away from what we did with rabbit drives.
I've got no better way to do this, but I think that the rabbit drives are interesting, because
they're an example that help you see the necessity of this mode of regulation for such a big
problem, but also just how weird it is.
I think you can see the complexity of that system more clearly — for good and for ill
— when you look at postcards like these and you see these rabbits and the crowd closing
in behind them.
Hi (breathing heavily, not in a good way).
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I'm trying to say everything before I have to breathe in again,.
(HEAVY BREATHING.)
Bye.