Voracious rabbits can push gardeners to their limits

A couple years ago, a friend reached out, desperate for suggestions on plants that rabbits wouldn’t destroy.

My suggestions, it turned out, were not effective against a possibly mutant strain of voracious rabbits that terrorize my friend’s Shorewood neighborhood.

When I asked how she was managing them, she produced a photo.

In it, she’s perched on a chair in her living room that overlooks the back yard. On the table next to her is a cup of coffee and in her hands, pointed straight out the open window, is a pellet gun.

The friend, who will remain anonymous because even though she’s a trained shooter, it’s definitely not legal to hunt rabbits in a quiet Shorewood neighborhood, has had success with her rabbit-management method. Her record is four in one day.

This is an extreme example of the lengths gardeners will go to to keep varmints from destroying their yards, but any gardener who has faced the wrath of Peter Cottontail and friends can empathize with the desire to get rid of them one way or another.

Rabbits are just one on a list of four-legged wildlife including deer, groundhogs and others that prefer the easy pickings of a cultivated garden, but they might be the most difficult to manage.

There is a longer list of plants that deer don’t prefer than the one for rabbits. And while deer can physically eat more than rabbits, the latter may be more destructive because they seem to chew indiscriminately. Few things are more enraging than finding a flower that was just about to bloom cut off with a rabbit’s telltale clean 45-degree cut and the flower left for dead. If they were going to kill it, they could at least have the courtesy to eat it.

Experts recommend fences as the best method of rabbit control. Two feet of chicken wire that is either pinned to the ground or buried should do the trick, according to the University of Wisconsin Extension. This seems more useful for fencing a small garden or individual plants rather than an entire yard.

Repellents can help, although there is limited research on their effectiveness. With rabbits, in particular, it seems like only the most foul-smelling repellents have an effect. Those with predator urine or blood have worked in my garden, but they also have the effect of repelling people as well.

Live trapping with a tempting bait is another method of control, but traps need to be very well disguised, and don’t be surprised if you are more successful in trapping opossums or skunks.

I was delighted to see evidence of my favorite type of rabbit control in my driveway recently. Wildlife scat is generally not something to celebrate, but when it’s from a fox, it’s a sign that the neighborhood rabbit population may be decreasing.

If you’re not fortunate enough to have a fox to help out, you may have to take a multi-pronged approach of managing rabbits.

Or you could read them this column, along with a recipe for hasenpfeffer.