When You Mess with Mother Nature

When You Mess with Mother Nature

What me Worry?”

Alfred E. Neuman from MAD Magazine.

Picture a quiet but far away corner of the world… a place where wisdom sometimes trails behind ambition, and where a man—blessed with time, money, and just enough knowledge to be dangerous—decides that nature could use a little help.

Meet Thomas Austin, self-appointed architect of the new and improved. A man who looked at the ancient balance of tooth and nail, root and rain, fire and frost… and concluded it could be improved with a little adjustment.

But every adjustment demands correction.

And in the quiet overgrowth of a world down under,  lies a lesson  for the next man with too much time, too much money… and not nearly enough caution.

 

“There’s plenty of room for all of Alaska’s animals — right next to the mashed potatoes.”   Sarah Palin

Like former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, Austin had the same fondness for animals—particularly rabbits. But there were none in Victoria, so in 1859 he imported two dozen European cotton tails and released them on his estate. Hunters have a term for this sort of thing: “put and take.”

Australia turned out to be a paradise for rabbits—plenty of food, mild winters, and few natural predators. They multiplied at a staggering pace, spreading across the continent at nearly 80 sq. miles a year. Within decades, millions became billions. Vegetation vanished, topsoil eroded, native species were pushed aside, and farmland suffered. What began as an idea to generate  one man’s hunting opportunities became an ecological catastrophe.

By the early 20th century, the problem had outgrown simple solutions. Fences stretched for miles. Poisons were deployed. Nothing worked for long. The rabbits always came back. Not until the introduction of Rabbit Hemorrhagic Disease Virus (RHDV) in the 1990s did the population sharply decline—and even then, only temporarily. Resistance developed. New strains of viruses must be created.

Today, billions still roam Australia, and they remain the country’s most destructive invasive species.

 

“Crocodiles are easy. They just want  to kill and eat you. People are harder. Sometimes they pretend to be your friends first.” Steve Irwin

Apart from “Throw another shrimp on the barbie,” Crocodile Dundee,  the occasional nightmare involving great white sharks, and Steven Irwin quotes, Americans don’t give Australia much thought. It’s a place of vague accents, dangerous wildlife, and animals that look like they were designed  by folks “under the influence.”

That was my understanding  until I asked about the stuffed kangaroo in Wayne’s office.

“That’s a small one—an Eastern Grey ” he said. “About 1.5 meters… sorry—around four feet. The big boys? Five, six feet tall. Two hundred pounds. And they box.”

That got my attention.

Wayne was an attorney and we just concluded a discussion about a legal mater.  Wayne, as I was to learn was a former “gun slinger” —which is not a combination you run into every day.

”Vacation souvenir?”    “In a way, yes,” came Wayne’s reply. I was on holiday when I saw the wanted poster.”

One of the proposed solutions to Australia’s rabbit problem was increased hunting. Locals had little time for it, so the call came out and hunters from New Zealand, the UK and the US joined in the hunt.

Then in his early twenties, Wayne   answered the request for help from a land as vast as it is forgiving, where everything wants to kill you, where distance is not measured in miles, but in hours, and water—whether from rivers, rainfall, or hidden underground—is never something you could count on. It was a place that demanded self-reliance. If something went wrong, there was no one to call. You handled it yourself.

Sometimes with a gun.

“I wasn’t exactly Paladin or Josh Randall,” Wayne told me with a grin, “but close enough.”

It sounded like the American frontier—dust, danger, and men who lived by their wits and their aim.

But this “Wild West” wasn’t in America.

It was Australia, in the 1960s.

Wayne had come on vacation. What he found was a job as a hired gun.

“We worked in small teams,” Wayne said. “Competition was fierce. And if you weren’t careful, someone might steal your pelts or horses.”

The work was hard, the pay uncertain, and the danger very real. He spoke of tense, sometimes violent confrontations in remote stretches of the Outback—places where law and order were more suggestion than reality.

“At night, we kept a big fire going,” he said. “Two men on guard at all times, four-hour shifts. Nobody slept through a watch. We all carried sidearms, and there was always a shotgun or rifle within reach. It wasn’t optional.”

He paused, then added with a slight smile, “There were outlaws on the Outback.”

It sounded like something straight out of Have Gun – Will Travel. And in a way, it was.

 

Wayne: “Bounty hunting never really had a chance of stopping the rabbit plague in Australia—the system was flawed from the start. Paying hunters per rabbit did encourage the, but it could never match the animals’ explosive breeding; rabbits multiply far faster than people can kill them. On top of that, many hunters targeted easy, accessible areas, leaving vast regions untouched where populations continued to surge. Worse still, the bounty system sometimes invited dishonest practices, like turning in the same carcasses more than once. In the end, it was just another  band-aide on a wound that refused to heal.”

And Australia has company.

In 1934, a German estate-owner  named Wilhelm von Berlepsch released raccoons into the forests near Kassel, hoping to go "Coon Hunting". A decade later, during the upheaval of World War II, fur farms were abandoned and more raccoons escaped—or were set free.

Germany, it turned out, was just as accommodating as Australia had been. With plentiful food, few predators, and a favorable climate, the raccoon population flourished.

Today, more than a million raccoons roam across Germany and into neighboring countries. They raid garbage, damage homes, spread disease, and compete with native wildlife.

Once again, a small decision echoed across decades.

“Nature keeps score,” Wayne said, reflecting on his days in the saddle.

"Whoever attempts to meddle with the natural order may regret it. You don’t mess with Mother Nature."

 

Epilogue

As I was about to leave the office, I paused at the door, caught by the painting Wayne had mounted on his office wall.

Wayne said, “That’s an Aboriginal dot painting. The dots aren’t just decoration. In works like this. A genuine painting carries a hidden meaning—sometimes it even protects cultural knowledge from outsiders. These paintings can represent tracks, waterholes, animals, and journeys. You get movement… depth.”

It was striking. I snapped a quick photo on my phone before saying goodbye.

Then Wayne added, “Arthur—the Indigenous man who painted it—used to hunt rabbits with me. Older guy. Knew a lot, though most of it came the hard way. As a boy, he’d been taken from his family during the Stolen Generations. Government policy back then—removal, institutions, assimilation. We became mates… friends.”

Wayne glanced back at the canvas.

“Arthur said the main shape is like those S-curve warning signs you see on county roads. There’s a warning. Adjust your course early—not later. Because once you’re in the bend, once you’ve disturbed what runs along that path, it’s already too late. The snake in it—guide and caution, both.”

He paused, then added quietly, “That warning's not abstract. Arthur painted it out of experience—chasing rabbits across a homeland that had already been thrown out of balance. He saw first-hand that what begins without thought rarely ends without consequence.

Wayne tapped the frame lightly.

“Follow its line and you’ll see: nature doesn’t move straight. Read the curves. Respect the land. Don’t wait for the second turn to realize you should’ve slowed at the first one. Then it’s too late” 

“And one more thing: Never step on a snake.” Wayne laughed.