Raising a Louisville Slugger, 16-year-old David Rodgers, alongside 20 farmers and ranchers, walked into a packed pen and began swinging with full force into a sea of jackrabbits. Blood spatter and fur filled the air, chased by incessant squealing and skull-shattering thuds, as women and children watched from a fenced perimeter. Forty minutes later, as Rodgers neared physical exhaustion, the carnage ebbed to unsettling silence and 1,500 dead rabbits.
Welcome to an agricultural necessity of yesteryear, as experienced by producers who annually lost millions of dollars to hare depredation and overpopulation.
“It was gruesome at all levels,” Rodgers says, “and it was never something I got used to, but when your livelihood, crops, or hay are at stake, your view changes. Today, when people hear what we had to do, they’re in shock—or even disbelief.”
Sticks, bats, and golf clubs were weapons of choice in massive critter drives performed by farm communities, resulting in the culling of millions of jackrabbits.
“It was so loud in those pens,” Rodgers recalls. “A ghastly sound. Even now, it still haunts me.”
Hot Chocolate and Doughnuts
In a multitude of states across the Southwest and West, jackrabbit population explosions once exploded in steady cycles. Peak numbers meant devastated crop rows, i.e., the jacks ate everything.
Dependent on white- or black-tailed species, jackrabbits can produce two to four litters per year; one to eight young per litter. Females can reproduce roughly seven months after birth. Their exponential growth is astonishing, particularly considering a 5-10 lb. jack can consume roughly 1 lb. of food per day.
Bounties were offered for rabbits as early as the 1870s. As described on Idaho farmland in Arid Acres, A History of the Kimama-Minidoka Homesteaders, 1912-1932: “The jackrabbits … came in hordes so thick that it looked as though the ground was moving. Guns were useless against them for although you could drop what you hit, the rest kept right on coming.”
Similar descriptions in Nebraska are recorded in Kimball County, 100 Years, 1888-1988: “In the early thirties the rabbits were so plentiful in Kimball County that on looking out over the prairie it looked like the ground was moving. They were becoming very destructive to crops. It was figured that 2,000 jack rabbits would eat as much feed as 175 sheep or 35 head of cattle … In December 1934 Kimball County paid bounty on 100,000 pair of ears, after a large hunt consisting of 800 men in a drive over nine sections.”
Rabbit drives—a euphemism for mass killing—were common as far back as the 1800s, with bounties and roundups recorded in the 1880s and 1890s. The drives, whether utilizing clubs or firearms, took various forms according to county and state. On Nov. 14, 1920, in Arizona, the Herald Democrat recorded 1,200 jacks killed at Avondale, south of Phoenix: “The government rodent pest department and Maricopa County supplied the ammunition for 160 hunters who took part in the drive.”
In 1934-1935, as stunningly detailed by the Emergency Relief Committee, over 2 million jackrabbits were culled in 13 counties of Great Depression-era western Kansas: the long-eared pest, in the absence of other food, went so far as to dig alfalfa roots out of the ground and eat the bark from young trees. More than 1,974 sections of land were combed during the rabbit drives and more than 98,000 men women and children took part in staging 269 drives and the average kill was 923 rabbits per drive.
… some of the rabbits killed in drives early in 1935 were used as food for human consumption and in many localities they were skinned and ground for tankage. Farmers reported that they made excellent feed for chickens and hogs.
Rabbit drives were a standard of the age—an agriculture norm, as described in January 1939, by the Tucumcari American, referencing a cull in Quay County, New Mexico: “Two thousand jackrabbits were killed on the Dick Maben ranch near Hudson when 75 hunters from the area gathered for the first hunt of the season sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce. Carl Darnell furnished beans, bread, and coffee to the hunters.”
Drive organizers commonly took out newspaper advertisements to attract participants, as recorded in a 1941 Spokane, Wash., press release: “The practice is to invite citizens who desire to participate. A fee of $2 is charged which is for bus transportation. Coffee is furnished by the police, but each individual brings his own lunch.”
Similarly, after a 1952 jack drive in Hamer, Idaho, The Rigby Star noted 5,000 rabbits killed on Jan. 3, with “hot chocolate and doughnuts” served to participants.
Into the 1970s, the rabbit drives continued.
Enter young David Rodgers and his experience on the killing floor.
Weapons of Choice
Surrounded by the valley beauty of the Big Lost River near Mackay, Idaho, Rodgers cut his teeth as a seventh-generation farm boy in a family that raised livestock, and grew barley and oats for feed, along with substantial production of hay.
And hay, for Rodgers, meant jackrabbits.
“They ate our hay like nothing you’ve ever seen,” he says. “The population explosions seemed to come and go, maybe because a lack of coyote pressure, but in heavy winters, the rabbits would decimate our bales. Their urine and feces would ruin the hay and make it unfit for livestock.”
Under cover of darkness, hordes of jackrabbits ate the bottom layer of Rodgers’ 2-string or 3-string bale stacks, essentially tunneling inward via rapid consumption. Once enough structure was removed, the stacks toppled. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Rodgers, now 56, was a teenage bale man. “My job was to restack the hay. I can’t calculate our losses, but other people had it far, far worse with their row crops or premium hay bound for dairies. It’s tough to convey just how many rabbits were out there. This was a time when local farmers supplied rural kids with .22 shells to kill rabbits all day long. Shooting rabbits with landowner-supplied ammo was normal, but it never made a dent in the rabbit population.”
When the jackrabbit population got too high, Rodgers’ Custer County and Butte County neighbors banded together for a drive, typically a weekend effort in the heart of winter—December, January, or February.
“The rabbits would come in from the brush and be extremely hungry. I’d say our drives averaged 60 people—men, women, and kids,” Rodgers recalls. “We’d gather at the edge of a field and set up a pen and wings.”
Composed of 8’- or 16’-long sheep panels (4’ high), pen size varied, but averaged near 32’ by 32’, creating an enclosure of 1,000-plus square feet. Rolls of woven net wire were uncoiled for approximately a quarter mile, resulting in a V-shaped funnel leading into the pen.
“Once we had things set up, we’d walk a loop into brush and start making commotion to scare the rabbits away from our presence and toward the pen. The rabbits would jump and we’d keep them going, contained by the wings and down the funnel. Cottontails would get in the mix, but we’d let them go because we were only thinning out the jacks.”
Each participant possessed a weapon of choice. Rodgers’ father utilized a broken shovel handle; several friends gripped golf clubs; and Rodgers carried a 1970s 27” Little League Louisville Slugger with lightning bolts branded in the wood above the trademark.
Once the walking wall reached the sheep-panel enclosure, jacks were contained within by the hundreds or thousands.
Rodgers describes the scenario: “There were times when the pen might only be a third full, but I also remember times when it was so full that rabbits were literally on top of one another. About 15 to 25 of us—men and older teens—would go in and start swinging. There was so much swinging it could be dangerous for the farmers.”
Blood, shrieks, cracks—for a seeming eternity. “By no means was it a quiet ordeal because it’s basically one rabbit at a time,” Rodgers explains. “I can still hear all the squeals, but I had to get over the feeling because we did what we had to do. You’re swinging a club and dressed in layers in below freezing temperatures, and it didn’t end until they were all dead—sometimes 30 to 45 minutes to dispatch an entire pen. No question, it was physically exhausting.”
“Was it gruesome? Yes. Was it necessary? Yes.”
Roughly 300 miles west of Rodgers, raised on the Idaho-Oregon line in Vale, Gary Grigg, 84, carries the same sentiments. “The rabbits were unbelievable,” Grigg describes. “It was basic: Kill them or let them eat everything. They’d devour wheat, barley, alfalfa, and I’ve even seen them dig in the ground for potatoes. Everything.”
Shotguns and Spotlights
Born in 1941 to a family that farmed on both sides of the state boundary, Grigg spent many a day armed with a .22 rifle or 20-gauge shotgun, protecting his father’s fields from hare depredation. Shooting several hundred jacks in a day was not uncommon.
“Rabbits were evvvvverywhere,” Grigg notes. “All the farmers we knew had crops destroyed by rabbits. We shot hundreds per day to little effect, but it was the rabbit drives that helped make a genuine difference.”
“Most of the time, we’d stretch a line of chicken wire fencing across a field and squeeze the rabbits into an enclosure. Then farmers would club them with bats. There were no animal rights protests or environmental outrage, because everyone knew the truth: We were just saving our crops and farmland.”
After a university degree in agronomy and 54 years in the turf business, Grigg’s most memorable jackrabbit encounter occurred 1,400 miles southeast of Vale, in Midland, Texas. In approximately 1979, his turf company was seeding greens on a blustery Midland golf course—until jackrabbits intervened.
“Every day, the wind blew so hard in Midland,” he recalls. “We’d seed a green, but the wind would blow off the seed, over and over. We tried mulch cover; nope. Instead, I told my guys to buy straw bales and build a 3-bale high fence around each green.”
Unable to find enough straw bales, Grigg’s workers purchased alfalfa bales and built makeshift wind blocks around the greens.
“Days later, they called me,” Grigg recalls. “‘You gotta come back down here, now. You’re not gonna believe what’s happened. Rabbits came in by the thousands and ate every single bale. Gone.’”
Grigg went roundup nuclear. His workers drove the course at night, strapped with shoguns and spotlights, killing droves of jackrabbits.
“Didn’t work,” he says. “Just too many.”
Bunny Baseball
By the 1980s, jackrabbit drives were winding down, but controversy was gearing up. The standard practice of rabbit roundups had caught the attention of animal welfare groups, newspapers, magazines, radio stations, television anchors, and politicians.
In 1981, responding to $5 million in crop and hay losses, farmers in the Mud Lake area, in Jefferson County, Idaho, planned a 15,000-jack cull on the farm of producer Joe Hartwell.
Aiming to temper a media frenzy, the drive organizers, led by Orvin Twitchell, chairman of the Mud Lake Farmers’ Rabbit Committee, decided to funnel the jacks into a massive, freshly-dug trench, and euthanize them with carbon dioxide gas. However, the trench method was abandoned in favor of a conventional clubbing, according to a Dec. 30, 1981 report in the Columbia Missourian: “… sub-freezing temperatures and a thick lava rock layer kept the National Guard from digging the makeshift gas chamber … Also, an Iowa mink-feed processor who has been buying the carcasses of clubbed rabbits for 15 cents each said he would not buy gassed rabbits.”
Idaho Farm Bureau Federation jumped into the fray, attempting to polish public perception with promises of a swift coup de grace. “The consensus, after consulting with the state veterinarian, was that the most humane way to kill the rabbits was to individually kill them with a sharp blow to the head. It will not be a mass clubbing,” assured IFBF spokesman Andy Anderson.
The national media stirred the rabbit pot, broadcasting headlines condemning “bunny baseball” and decrying inclusion of teens on the drives. The colorful Twitchell, who reported over $100,000 in personal crop losses in 1981, stood his ground: “I and three-fourths of the people in the West had rather see those kids in that sagebrush, even if they are beating jackrabbits, than have them in front of a boob tube watching sex movies or in Idaho Falls drinking beer and smoking pot.”
The media spectacle turned even more bizarre when two Nigerians arrived on scene, offering a $6 per jackrabbit bounty, with the purported intention of shipping the meat to undernourished countrymen in Africa.
On Dec. 12, at approximately 8 a.m., a force of Idaho producers formed a line and began pushing jacks. As described in the New York Times: The hares were rounded up in a three-mile-square area by 400 farmers on horseback, motorcycles and on foot, armed with pool cues, baseball bats and homemade spears and golf clubs.
Much to Twitchell’s chagrin, a television helicopter buzzed overhead during the drive, sending four-fifths of the jacks scattering back into sagebrush. Of the 15,000 jacks initially in Twitchell’s crosshairs, only 3,000 were caught and culled. Consequently, he labeled the drive a “flop.”
The NYT continues: Eventually the hares were herded into a fenced enclosure where they were killed. Other farmers slit the throats of the jackrabbits, and still others skinned the carcasses to prepare them for freezing in order to preserve the meat.
And the Nigerians? They failed to produce any coin, but were last seen driving south, hauling their unpaid load of rabbit flesh to parts unknown.
And the Mud Lake farmers? They were sued by New York-based Fund for Animals, Inc., on the grounds of animal cruelty. A district court ruled in favor of farmers, noting the economic necessity of rabbit roundups. Following an appeal by Fund for Animals, the Idaho Supreme Court approved the district court decision in 1983, maintaining the legality of culls. However, the Supreme Court stipulated that no children under 12 could participate in a drive; no youths under 16 could enter a killing pen; and no one of any age could play “bunny baseball.”
On With the Hunt
The most surreal chapters of U.S. agriculture history always contain a layer of contradiction. Jackrabbits, no different.
David Rodgers’ grandparents, John and Erma, married during the Great Depression. In summertime, John herded sheep in the magnificent high country beside the Big Lost River. In winter, he and Erma hunkered down in a bankside cabin, with no means of income beyond a bolt-action .22 rife.
Weather permitting, the young couple hunted jacks in the surrounding acreage for their sustenance. John carried a gun; Erma carried a sack. John shot a rabbit; Erma picked up the kill. John cased a rabbit; Erma held it fast. Into the sack and on with the hunt.
Such was the daily regimen. Sack bulging with jacks, John and Erma would return home, where she would enter the cabin to build a fire and prepare supper, while he would continue to the shed to build a fire and attach the rabbit hides to stretchers made from willow bows.
“They’d scour whatever newspapers they could get hold of, looking to see who paid the most for rabbit hides,” Rodgers details. “Then they’d mail bundles of 100 hides to different companies and get back tiny checks in the mail. It’s no exaggeration: They were a young couple depending on jackrabbits for their winter survival.”
“It’s mind-blowing,” he concludes. “The jackrabbit sustained my family in some years and caused my family economic hardship in others. And that same animal is at the center one of the most brutal and necessary parts of our farming and ranching past. How’s that for irony?”
For more from Chris Bennett (@ChrisBennettMS or cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:
Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told
