Another of my Grandpa hunting stories, but this is more of a just pure vermin killing story.
The type of country our farms & orchids were in was a kind of sand hill country. There was flat ground in between old sand hills that looked like they were blown by the wind a long time ago. Then they covered with trees & shrubs & in those days were mostly not cleared & farmed. The sand hills all ran in the same direction N-S for many miles & crossed the landscape at about 3/4 to a mile apart. Open irrigation channels ran along the contour of the hillside & the water flowed down from there to irrigate the flats. We had no pumps or sprinklers in those days to irrigate the hills so they were natural vegetation.
Our place was from the back side of one of these to the centre top of the next. So the rise of the sand hill was at the back of the home block.

In those days the rabbits were plentiful because the Dep't of Agriculture had not yet released the diseases into the population. The rabbits were pests in the crops & they attracted foxes which hunted them & our poultry. Most of this vermin population lived on or in the sand hills where the digging was easy for making a burrow. The usual method of control was called rabbit ripping, where a larger tractor of the time like an IH WD6 or similar had a deep ripping tyne on the three point linkage & was used to rip & collapse the warrens in on the hapless occupants.

Well, Grandpa had a different idea, as usual. We would load up our kit on the trailer & it consisted of a piece of steel flex pipe with a rubber hose attached, a shovel, a knapsack sprayer filled with petrol. A 20 foot long plastic conduit with a wire threaded through it which was connected to a spark plug from a car fitted into one end. A magneto ignition off an old hit & miss engine. A single barrel Winchester 12g shotgun & shells. We hooked this onto a Grey TE 20 Ferguson petrol tractor & headed up the hill to the rabbit warrens.

We would hook up the flex pipe & hose to the tractors exhaust & put it down one hole & fill in & pack it tight at the opening. then go around the warren & fill in all but one hole.
Start the tractor & pull a few revs on & pull the choke out.
The tractor would go blert blert blert & pump fumes out the exhaust into the warren. One of us would wait at the open hole with the 12g & whoever brer rabbit or brer fox would come out all bleary eyed & coughing to the welcome of a face full of number fours. We used this method mainly when we thought there was a fox down there.

If there were just rabbit foot prints at the burrows then we put the plastic conduit pipe with the spark plug end right down in there, then got the knapsack sprayer & misted petrol down the holes & let that all circulate through for a while. We then shoveled dirt into all the holes & jump it down a bit then hooked the wire coming up the conduit from the spark plug to the magneto.
Give the magneto a spin & WWHhoomph the whole warren would lift about a foot & collapse back down thereby burying those blasted rabbits.

Mum did not like it too much but I can tell you that we sure did.
Brings a smile to my dial even now.

O.M