There is nothing wrong with a few rabbits. While these cute and furry herbivores are famously fast at reproducing, their numbers in the wild are tempered by natural predators and the fact that their intense breeding season doesn’t go through the winter — here in North America, at least.

But Australia and New Zealand, where rabbits have been introduced, are warm enough that they breed year-round. Due to sheer numbers, they have become major pests.

Even if, somehow, the rabbits could be taught to behave themselves — to avoid farm crops and home gardens, for instance — they would squeeze out native animals and decimate native vegetation unless something was done about their numbers. Each rabbit isn’t the problem; it’s all of them, en masse.

Believe it or not, this is an editorial about short-term vacation rentals.

There is nothing wrong with them on their own. They provide travelers with competitive alternatives to hotels and give homeowners the option of extra revenue from their property. Over the years, some Lake Placid neighbors have warned local leaders about problems with parking or noise, but it never seemed to be a big enough problem to merit regulations.

Now it is, not because the vacationers have gotten rowdier or the owners more careless, but because of sheer numbers — now some 700 active short-term rental units exist in the relatively small area we call Lake Placid.

No single one of them is to blame. The problem is all of them. Each one has a right to some economic freedom, but if so many property owners do the same thing, it squeezes out others.

It’s not easy to control, but it’s gotten to the point that the business-friendly Lake Placid village and North Elba town boards are considering regulations, which are now in their third draft in the past year and still haven’t passed. The rules would require permits for short-term rentals and set rules for occupancy numbers, parking, noise and septic systems. They would cap the number of nights a year a non-owner-occupied property could be rented at 90, but this wouldn’t apply to owner-occupied properties.

All this is essentially an effort to get the rabbits to behave. But it wouldn’t do anything — not directly, at least — to reduce their numbers. That would require something like a cap on short-term rental units overall.

It also wouldn’t limit where they could go. That would require some kind of crackdown to weed them out of areas zoned for residential use.

Doing either of those things now, at least, would be massively confrontational. Rental property owners, including locals, would push back hard. The fight might hurt Lake Placid’s reputation as a vacation destination, and if the tough regulations won, it might hurt the capacity to house visitors here.

But avoiding those things ignores the core problem.

It’s hard to be sure, but it’s a safe bet that Lake Placid has lost several hundred apartments and affordable houses to short-term rental conversion in the last 20 years. That means hundreds of people who work in Lake Placid can no longer live here. No one is building housing for these people. The county bus from Malone is full, but not elementary school classrooms, or church services, or streets with costumed kids on Halloween.

Count us among the locals who do not want Lake Placid to slide into becoming an exclusive high-end resort like Vail, Colorado, or Whistler, British Columbia. We want it to stay in the sweet spot in the middle of that and a great American small town.

Building Lake Placid into a two-time Olympic host village took local individuals with a great deal of ingenuity, spirit and persistence, along with a bottomless well of enthusiastic support from the community of year-round residents. Those are the roots of our tourism tree, and right now they need some attention so the fruit doesn’t grow bitter, even poisonous.

We think the current short-term rental rules are OK for now, but they should be the start, not the end, of the process of tending to the community’ residential roots.

What do you think? Let your voice be heard at a public hearing on these rules Tuesday at the Conference Center wing of the Olympic Center on Main Street, Lake Placid.