Hi Lois, welcome!

What a frustrating position you're in! You're definitely not alone there, we've been increasingly hearing that rabbits in those kind of peri-urban areas are a growing problem for a lot of areas around the country, and extra difficult to deal with because of the complicated human element as you have found. Hopefully you've found some useful nuggets of information on the rabbit control pages of our website already. Much of it is more general (though still useful) but we are actively working on some more peri-urban specific content.

In the mean time, I don't know of any WA specific studies but I do have some powerful rabbit statistics that I think make a very convincing case for rabbit control:

At densities as little as 0.5 rabbits/ha rabbits completely prevent recruitment of the more palatable native shrubs ("Estimating density-dependent impacts of European rabbits on Australian tree and shrub populations" by Mutze, Cooke and Jennings 2016)

The dramatic decline in arid rabbits in the initial years following RHDV resulted in 241–365% increases in the range of threatened native rodents, attributed to decreased competition for resources and also a reduction in predators which previously relied on rabbits to sustain higher numbers. ("Rabbit biocontrol and landscape-scale recovery of threatened desert mammals" by Pedler et al 2016)

Male rabbits in spring are estimated to eat 65.7g dry matter/day and lactating females ate 97.0 g dry matter/day, implying that even moderate densities of rabbits (5 rabbits per ha) could remove about half the pasture produced in an average year in Australia’s arid-zone. ("Daily food intake of free-ranging wild rabbits in semiarid South Australia" by Cooke 2014)

European rabbits competing with livestock for pasture was estimated to cost Australian agricultural producers $114 million in an average year (averaged over 5 years to 2020–21) in lost sheep meat, wool, and beef production, after a further $82 million in control expenses (ABARES 2019 Pest Animal and Weed Management Survey). Compared to other introduced pests expenditure was low and remaining impact very high, so rabbit control is typically under-invested. ("Cost of established pest animals and weeds to Australian agricultural producers" Hafi et al 2023)

You mention death of established trees, is that something you're observing locally? If so it'd be great if you'd be willing to send us a picture that we could use in our file of rabbit impact images.

I believe that rabbits can indeed ring bark established trees and kill them but it's not common. They preferentially eat seedlings or very young saplings, so their biggest impact is usually preventing recruitment of the next generation of plants, which you don't tend to notice that until years later when the old ones die and suddenly there's a very different landscape. They also prop up fox numbers, compete with native herbivores for food, create conditions that favour weed growth over natives and damage human infrastructure. More details here.

All the best,

Amy (a rabbit genetics researcher)