Cape Town, February 07: “It’s a clean, fast kill,” says marksman Abelines Schoeman, as his spotlight searches in the darkness for the telltale red glint that betrays a rabbit’s eye.
He stops his quad bike, levels the .22 rifle that has both a silencer and telescopic sights, and there is a muffled crack.
The beam of light shows a brief flurry of brown and white fur in the scrub, then stillness.
Schoeman walks rapidly over to the rabbit. It is indeed a clean kill: a bullet through the skull.
But to make certain, he delivers a sharp blow to the back of the neck with a heavy stick, before dropping the warm corpse into a red plastic crate strapped to the back of the bike.
The rabbit is one of some 6 700 that have been shot in a four-month culling programme on Robben Island, where the creatures were introduced by early sailors to breed as a source of meat.
They, together with a burgeoning population of fallow deer – also alien to South Africa – have devastated the 475-hectare island’s natural vegetation, leaving it with a covering of invasive aliens such as rooikrans and scrub that even starving rabbits find unpalatable.
—Agencies