The Rabbit Drive: A Spectacle of Violence and Masculinity in the American West, 1880s to 1930s

Between the 1880s and 1930s millions of rabbits were slaughtered across the American West in mass spectacles of pest control called rabbit drives. Drives sought to respond to the threat posed by rapidly growing rabbit populations at this time, emerging from changing ecosystems induced by colonization and the industrialization of agriculture in the West. Rabbits were driven into corrals and then beaten to death by men and boys while hundreds if not thousands watched. By focusing on rural and predominantly working-class White men, this article writes the first history of the rabbit drive and does so through an examination of how masculinity dictated the form of this ritual of communal animal killing. Nascent agricultural towns in California and embattled rural communities in the Great Plains responded to external threats from the environment by reasserting masculine domination of nature. In contrast to wealthy big game hunters who primarily used writing to project their manhood, it was through photographs that drives were practiced, shared, and understood. The camera served to eternally fix the male participants as victors in the staged battle between man and beast. Indeed, we cannot understand the rabbit drive without understanding its visuality, seeing it as a self-consciously constructed act of masculine theater that was always intended to be observed. In doing so, the rabbit drive shows how seeming crises in the environment have been creatively repositioned as opportunities to in fact protect, reinforce, and exalt masculine control over nature and society.