On Monday the House of Lords accepted with reluctance the
Government's proposal to make the spreading of myxomatosis an offence. It is arguable that, if the entire rabbit population is doomed to the disease, it is better from their and everybody else's point of view that they should get it over quickly; but there is something undeniably repugnant about the practice (which I suspect has not been widely indulged in) of introducing myxomatosis into areas hitherto free from it, What I am not clear about is what a land-owner or a farmet ought to do, in a part of the country where the disease seems to take a mild form and to spread, very slowly, when it appear9 • among some of the rabbits in one corner of his property, Experience suggests that . it may take months to infect the rabbits on the other parts of his land. Is he justified in doing what he can to spread the disease within his own boundaries ? It will almost certainly pay him to do so. Given the expecta• tion of one season completely free of rabbits he can take riskS —such as establishing a new plantation without spending money on wire-netting—which he could not take if his myxomatosis was killing all the rabbits in one wood but showed no signs of reaching another wood half a mile away. This sort of situation seems to be quite common in placel where outbreaks only began to occur after the summer waS over. For myself, I do not think that it ought to be an offence to spread myxomatosis—so to speak—intramurally.
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