Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 2 (2010), pp. 255–276

Since the eighteenth century the rabbit has occupied an ambivalent position in the countryside. Not only were they of sporting value but they were also valued for their meat and pelt. Attitudes to the rabbit altered though over the first half of the century, and this paper traces their redefinition as vermin. By the 1930s, it was appreciated that wild rabbits were Britain’s most serious vertebrate pest of cereal crops and grassland and that their numbers were having a significant effect on agricultural output. Government took steps to destroy rabbits from 1938 and launched campaigns against them during wartime, when rabbit was once again a form of meat. Thereafter government attitudes to the rabbit hardened, but it was not until the mid-1950s that pestilence in the form of a deadly virus, myxomatosis, precipitated an unprecedented decline in their population. 

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