Moving Farm Rodents On

Dr. Rudolf Steiner sent rabbits away from Count Keyserlingk’s estates in Silesia using Homeopathy. Mice, tics and other pests should be able to be controlled in exactly the same way.  With the terrible plague now in 2021, it is time to make some of this remedy for mice and rats and so stop the plague.  

What would it take to do it?  Not much. A Homeopath could do this in a week or so.  So, let's do it!

An aside: I had asked a dear friend Stefan Talmatzky to make a remedy to get rid of Tics around Bermagui, NSW and surrounds.  He started to do it - however the Cobargo fires of 2020 wiped out his house and with it, all his remedies. He died a few months later as did so many others from the area. His Facebook page is here: https://www.facebook.com/stefan.talmatzky.

Clem Clarke, 2021.

The situation became yet more chaotic after the war when Count Keyserlingk announced that he would no longer countenance the shooting of any form of wild life on his own estates or the lands of his tenant farmers. 

He also refused to permit the use of poisons. “I am searching for some alternative method to get rid of the pests,” he told his angry neighbours. 

In the spring of 1924 Count Keyserlingk invited interested landowners, farmers and market-gardeners from all over Europe to attend an Agricultural conference at his Koberwitz home in order to promote “an attitude to farming in which the earth and nature were no longer regarded as objects of shortsighted financial exploitation.” The conference would also consider a new bio-dynamic method of farming, to produce healthier crops, prevent soil erosion, combat pollution, and curtail the multiplication of plant and animal diseases arising from the use of industrial poisons and synthetic fertilisers. The highlight of the conference would be a demonstration of a new form of Test Control’ which would rid the estate and neighbouring lands of the whole rabbit population in three days. 

A rumour circulated amongst the local peasantry and smallholders that Count Keyserlingk was bringing to Koberwitz a celebrated ‘Wizard’ who, like the legendary Pied Piper, would spirit the rabbits away. They waited with a mixture of apprehension, superstition and curiosity for the appearance of this magician who would wave his wand and conjure away the teeming rabbit population without recourse to guns or poisons. 

The man about to perform this apparent miracle was Dr. Rudolf Steiner who was to deliver a series of lectures at the conference. On arrival at Koberwitz he requested that a male rabbit should be shot and brought to the room temporarily set up as a laboratory. He removed the spleen, testes and a portion of the rabbit skin. These items were burned to ashes. The ashes were then mixed with a neutral powder, sugar of milk, and homeopathically ‘potentised’ beyond the boundary of ponderable existence. There was nothing new in itself with homeopathic potentisation. It is a process used regularly at such institutions as the Royal Homeopathic Hospital in London and by several thousand fully qualified medical practitioners throughout the world. It was the purpose for which Dr. Steiner intended to use this particular potentisation that was of startling significance.* 

* Dr. Ernst Lehrs, one of Steiner’s closest pupils, has given a short description of Homeopathy and the process of potentising which may help the reader who is unfamiliar with these concepts: 

“The method in question is associated with the school of medicine known as Homeopathy, founded by the German doctor, Hahnemann. The word ‘Homeopathy’ means healing through like*; the basic principle is to treat disease symptoms with highly diluted substances which produce similar symptoms if ingested in normal quantity. Experience has in fact shown that the physiological efTcct of a substance taken from external nature is reversed when the substance is highly diluted. 

“The method of diluting, or ‘potentising’, is as follows: A given volume of the material to be diluted is dissolved in nine times its volume of distilled water. The degree of dilution thus arrived at is 1 : 10, usually symbolised ix. A tenth part of this solution is again mixed with nine times its bulk in water. The degree of dilution is now i : 100, or 2X. This process is continued as far as it is necessary' for a given purpose. Insoluble substances can be dealt with in the same manner by first grinding them together with corresponding quantities of a neutral powder, generally sugar of milk. After a certain number of stages the powder can be dissolved in water; the solution may then be diluted further in the manner already described. 

“We can carry the dilutions as far as we please without destroying the capacity of the substance to produce physiological reactions. On the con- trary, as soon as its original capacity is reduced to a minimum by dilution, further dilution gives it the power to cause even stronger reactions, of a different and usually opposite kind. The second capacity rises through stages to a variable maximum as dilution proceeds. 

“A simple calculation shows that not a single molecule of the original substance will remain in solution after a certain degree of dilution is reached. Yet the biological and other reactions continue long after this, and are even enhanced. 

“What this potentising process shows is that, by repeated expansion in space, a substance can be carried beyond the ponderable conditions of matter into the realm of pure functional effect. The potentisation of physical substances thus gains a significance far wider than that of its medical use.” Dr. Ernst Lehrs: Man or Matter. Faber and Faber. 

THE ASHES 

His intention was to induce a condition of such total insecurity in relation to their present habitat that the whole rabbit population would quit the area in panic. To achieve this end he was utilising those organs from the buck rabbit which in his opinion were the physiological basis for the instinct of survival within the species. The homeopathic potency would transform this instinct into it’s very opposite. Spread on the wind and absorbed through respiration, he conceived that the concoction would have a functional effect on the rabbits similar to that condition which nature herself induces in Lemmings when, their numbers greater than their environment can withstand, they gather in their thousands bent on self-destruction. 

Dr. Steiner carried his concoction in a bucket to the paddock near the house. He held in his other hand the type of brush normally used to sweep crumbs into a dustpan. He dipped the brush into the liquid and flicked it like fine rain into the wind. Young assistants carried similar buckets up wind to the borders of the estate and also spread the- homeopathic potency like fine spray. 

During the following two days nothing happened. The rabbit population were still very much in evidence guzzling the spring vegetables and apparently quite oblivious of their fate. The peasants and farm labourers breathed a sigh of relief. The ‘Wizard* was apparently an ordinary mortal after all. Count Keyserlingk would have to permit shooting once more! 

Dr. Steiner pointed out to the members of the conference that homeopathic treatments were unlike their allopathic counterparts which induced an immediate physical reaction. His homeopathic concoction would take three days to penetrate the life organism of the rabbits. By dusk the following night there would not be a single rabbit in the whole area. He described how vermin throughout the world would slowly build up a resistance to the allopathic poisons at present in use. And he predicted correctly that science would be hard put to it in the second half of the century to devise poisons which had any effect on vermin. The type of pest control which he was now demonstrating would, by necessity, be recognised by future generations as the only possible answer to the problem. 

When dawn broke the following morning thousands of rabbits were to be seen in a huge cluster round an old ash tree in the paddock. They appeared to be in a state of intense excitement, restless, quivering, running up and down and sniffing the air with obvious perturbation. From all directions they were joined by more and more rabbits that came dashing across the fields, running across farmyards and stables, and even scampering down garden paths, apparently oblivious of the dangers of human contact. 

Reports came in from all parts of the vast estate and neighbouring farm lands. Throughout the entire area rabbits were quitting their burrows and warrens as though their natural habitat was now a threat to their very survival, forming other huge clusters in a condition of frantic agitation. By late afternoon the separate clusters had joined together in a single mass in a far corner of the estate. Shortly before dusk the entire rabbit population disappeared in one enormous panic-stricken swarm heading in a north- easterly direction towards the distant wastelands and marshes. No rabbit would be seen nor rabbit spoor discovered on the Keyserlingk lands for many years to come.