Eradicate the rabbit: dedicate Easter to the bilby

While the Easter Bunny has long been a part of the Easter tradition, animal ethics adviser and veterinarian Dr Ian Gunn says that replacing the bunny with the bilby as the Australian symbol of Easter could help protect the threatened species.

Dr Gunn, from the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences at Monash University, said the sale of Easter bilbies instead of bunnies has helped to raise public awareness of the plight of the endearing desert-dwelling marsupial, but with fewer than 1000 bilbies thought to be living in the wild, greater support was needed.

"It seems absurd to be promoting an introduced rabbit as a symbol of Easter,” Dr Gunn said.

The bilby once hopped around most of Australia but the arrival of European settlers around 200 years ago saw the introduction of the rabbit. No one realised how well the species would adapt and how rapidly it would multiply. They ran the bilbies out of their burrows while devouring their food sources, while other introduced species like foxes and cats preyed on them.

“Today bilby numbers are less than a thousand and dwindling, but Easter traditions, and chocolate in particular, could help to elevate the bilby status by delivering a very important conservation and education message,” Dr Gunn said.

“Funds from chocolate sales also aid conservation projects like captive breeding and research programs, and projects that fence in thousands of acres of land to keep bilbies safe from cats and foxes, so they can be released back into the wild.”

In recent years, the enormous effort to save the creature and other native wildlife under threat of extinction has extended to artificial reproduction techniques. Dr Gunn is Project Director of the Animal Gene Storage and Resource Centre of Australia (AGSRCA), based at Monash University.

Colloquially known as the ‘Frozen Zoo’, the Centre acts like a bank and preserves the reproductive cells of animals in liquid nitrogen and can store them for many years before they are used for breeding, research and disease investigation. When it was established in 1995, the Centre was the world’s first national wildlife gene bank and remains the only facility of its kind in the country.

Dr Gunn said the Centre played a vital role in maintaining biodiversity.

“The world’s animal resources are rapidly declining. Globally, more than 5000 wildlife species are threatened with extinction. An animal gene bank is a guarantee that, in the face of a possible catastrophe – exotic disease outbreaks, fires, floods, or wars – it will be possible to save our animal resources," Dr Gunn said.

“The continued decline of some of Australia’s native wildlife including the bilby and the Tasmanian devil is a serious disaster for our country. If nothing is done, generations of people may never get the chance to see these important creatures."