"As the game developed, separate teeing grounds were eventually established and the golf course in the form we know it today gradually began to emerge. The players relied on the rabbits and the sheep to keep the grass short-cropped, for it was not until the early part of the twentieth century that mechanized grass cutting began to take over from the animals in golf course management. Indeed many of Britain's seaside links, Saunton sands in Devon being a classic example, relied exclusively on rabbits to keep their fairways tightly cropped until well into the second half of the twentieth century when the myxomatosis epidemic of the 1950s killed so many of the rabbits off."