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New Zealand’s crusade to rid itself of mammals
- arfar 12y agoHopefully not ALL the mammals. New Zealand does have some native mammals. The short tailed bat [0] [0] http://www.doc.govt.nz/conservation/native-animals/bats/ http://www.doc.govt.nz/conservation/native-animals/bats/
- derf_ 12y agoI hear there are also about 4 and a half million homo sapiens there, though presumably they are an introduced species.
- zhte415 12y agoAnd 40 million sheep, though this is down from 70 million in 1982.
- danieltillett 12y agoThis invasive species is slowly being relocated to Australia.
- RowanH 12y ago...they've started coming back.
- tacticus 12y agoThanks Tony?
- pm 12y agoIt would just be easier to reclassify NZ as Australian territory.
- danieltillett 12y agoBeing more serious NZ has the right to join as an Australian state when they want. It is really an historical accident that they never did.
- pm 12y agoI couldn't imagine they'd want to do that after all this time.
- danieltillett 12y agoAustralians and New Zealanders like to pretend that we are really different, but we are very similar. In reality we operate as a single country economically, but on the sporting field that we are two countries.
- disordinary 12y agoThat is not reality at all, there is very close collaboration between the two countries but its like saying Canada and the US operate as a single country economically. There are also significant differences ideologically between the societies as a stereotype.
- danieltillett 12y agoNew Zealand's economy maps closer to New South Wales' economy than NSW does to Western Australia's economy (these are Australian States). If you look on the back of any product for sale in Australia or New Zealand you will see they are made for both markets. Citizens from either country can go and work and live in either country without a visa. None of these apply to the USA and Canada. Politically New Zealand and Australia are different, but I think a lot of that difference is due to Australian federation and our electoral systems. If New Zealand were to join as an Australian state and use the Australian system of preferential voting (instant runoff) I think we would see a convergence in politics. I don't see New Zealand joining the Australian federation anytime soon, but if there was a desire it could happen pretty easily.
- EdwardDiego 12y agoA lot of people are also fond of the recreational hunting species (Red/fallow/sambar/rusa/sika/whitetail deer, chamois, tahr, goats, wild pigs, wild cattle... and maybe a tiny population of moose). They are controlled to some extent via the occasional cull, (and if they die as a result of the 1080 drops, DOC's official position is a shrug), but for the most part their numbers are kept low by recreational hunting, and economics... ...when deer population numbers get high, the animals become economically viable to harvest for meat by helicopter, so the WARO (Wild Animal Recovery Operation) flights take off, shoot all that they can, and then export it to Germany, who loves wild venison. The recreational hunters shake their fists at the helicopters, but it keeps the animal numbers at an acceptable level.
- jordanthoms 12y agoIt's a bit of overstatement, but the general idea of getting rid of the invasive mammals would be great. A massive project though, getting rid of animals trying to survive is incredibly hard - one of my uncles worked on clearing Motuihe in the Auckland harbour, and they had a hell of a time with the rabbits - when threatened, they go into a 2-week breeding cycle, and were hiding in holes halfway down the cliffs!
- timClicks 12y agoThere was a great Nerdnite talk about those bats not long ago http://auckland.nerdnite.com/2014/10/05/nerd-nite-auckland-chapter-21/ http://auckland.nerdnite.com/2014/10/05/nerd-nite-auckland-c...
- tokenadult 12y agoThe introduced rats were a foodstuff for the Polynesian sailors who brought them to New Zealand.[1] The article mentions the exception of the bats, [edit (thanks!): and mentions stoats and ferrets being released to hunt rabbits, without specifically mentioning how the stoats] got to New Zealand. Looking up the issue,[2] it appears that several of the nastiest invasive species on New Zealand were brought in to be hunted for sport, which has turned out to be a mistake. Where I live in central North America, I have seen and heard coyote quite near by, and I'm glad they are here, as they help cull the deer, which I have also seen at very close range in my neighborhood. (Once my third son and I happened to meet going opposite directions on our city trail just where my son had noticed a magnificent eight-point buck calmly browsing in the restored wild swamp alongside the trail.) Here it is actually important to kill native deer, as deer are the most lethal wild animal in the United States today.[3] [1] http://www.doc.govt.nz/Documents/about-doc/concessions-and-permits/conservation-revealed/kiore-pacific-rat-polynesian-rat-lowres.pdf http://www.doc.govt.nz/Documents/about-doc/concessions-and-p... [2] http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/1966/mammals-introduced http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/1966/mammals-introduced [3] http://reason.com/archives/2001/11/21/north-americas-most-dangerous http://reason.com/archives/2001/11/21/north-americas-most-da...
- sk5t 12y agoThe article suggests that stoats were brought over to try to control the rabbit population. A real forehead-slapper...
- EdwardDiego 12y agoWell, mustelids worked well for rabbits in England. And to be fair, ferrets (they introduced stoats, weasels and ferrets) do spend most of their time in the grasslands preying on rabbits. It's the stoats and weasels that really devastate the birds. The 1080 drops for rodents works on well on mustelids too, as they tend to eat the dead bodies, and 1080 bioaccumulates. But yeah, in hindsight, thanks guys. But at least they didn't get around to introducing dingoes from Australia to control the possums as proposed.
- vince_refiti 12y ago
- mynameishere 12y agoNew Zealand’s Apollo program Wiping out rats? The Apollo program? I know it's a small country, but wiping out rodents is both hopelessly petty and hopelessly grandiose at the same time. Spoiler: The mammals will win.
- lackstein 12y agoWiping out rats is possible. While not exactly the same situation, the Canadian province of Alberta is rat-free due to an aggressive program to prevent and contain infestations [0]. [0] http://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$department/deptdocs.nsf/all/agdex3441 http://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$department/deptdocs.nsf/all/agd...
- soperj 12y agothey've also done it on several islands in haida gwaii(queen charlotte islands) in BC.
- Semiapies 12y agoAlberta is not a very welcoming environment to the human-dependent Norway rats that article talks in the first place. It's a huge, empty area that, for those rats, is a barren wasteland with a few tiny oases of human population - and the Albertans still have to constantly clean out new infestations. New Zealand is vastly more welcoming to the invasive species it has. In a decade or three, they'll call it "good enough" on the mainland islands and spend a great deal of effort in perpetuity to keep pest levels under a modicum of control.
- kghose 12y agoThe writing reminded me of Roald Dahl's "The Ratcatcher."
- Sorgam 12y agoIt's good to see conservationists admit that their task is mostly killing. Too often people confuse conserving a species with being nice to animals. They're diametrically opposite ambitions. Conservationists sometimes try to tap into our "don't kill cute animals" feeling to support their cause, but have to do a 180 when it doesn't suit. I once proposed to someone that the best way to prevent whales being killed was to kill them all. It's surely true, they can't be hunted if they're never even born. But his response was "you have no morals". Actually conservationism is an activity without morals.
- dashboardfront 12y ago> I once proposed to someone that the best way to prevent whales being killed was to kill them all. It's surely true, they can't be hunted if they're never even born. But his response was "you have no morals". Actually conservationism is an activity without morals. Okay... But I'm pretty sure a conservationists goal is not to make species go extinct. There is a long run goal which is the survival of as many species and habitats as possible. Being nice animals is not diametrically opposed with being a conversationist, nor would a conversationist actually argue for killing all whales unless it had greater benefits for ocean ecosystems as a whole. You're ignoring the long-term consequences and only focusing on the actions themselves in calculating moral utility.
- XorNot 12y agoThere's also the prickly moral issue that whales are not clearly non-sentient, on a similar level of consciousness to humans.
- mkal_tsr 12y agoGuy Williams has your back https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AG4odHCokw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AG4odHCokw
- mcv 12y agoWiping out the species you're trying to save is obviously ludicrous. The point of this article is that rats (which are dead common in practically all corners of the world) pose an enormous threat to lots of unique species and ecosystems, and controlling rats is necessary if you want to preserve those unique species and ecosystems. Spreaking large amounts of poison to do that, certainly makes me quite uncomfortable. But I'm no conservationist, so I can't really judge whether that's ultimately a good or bad idea.
- aj 12y agoI hope the top on the list is Homo Sapiens
- digisign 12y agoAnimals aren't the only pests, the hills around Wellington for example are filled with gorse, a horrible, horrible plant. Would definitely like to send a Terminator back thru time to eliminate the fools who brought it.
- vince_refiti 12y agoGorse, as I understand it, was brought to New Zealand to be used as fencing between farm fields.
- duckmannz 12y agoI understood it was also because of the pretty yellow flowers and that it didn't grow so well in western Europe
- talideon 12y agoIt grows plenty well in western Europe.
- merrua 12y agoThis seems likely since it was used for that back in the UK. Also the flowers were used for making dye.
- haydenchambers 12y agoThere's another pest in the Wellington hills that needs eradicating but they're mostly concentrated in the Beehive
- mark-r 12y agoI was quite taken by the hillsides that were completely covered in bushes with bright yellow flowers. I asked what they were, and was surprised to find out they were an invasive species. Sure were beautiful though!
- kposehn 12y agoI visited New Zealand for the millennium. When we picked up our rental car in Auckland, the following conversation happened: "Sir, a moment before I give you your keys?" "Certainly." "You know what a possum is, correct?" "Yeah." "Well, we have these furry cute ones that foreigners love to coo over." "Really?" "Yes. Very cute. Fuzzy and the like." "Fascinating" "Quite! Now, if you see one of the little buggers on the road, there's something you should do." "Oh? Slow down or drive around them? What should I do?" "Aim." Total tally: 15
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y agoSounds like a fun road trip.
- ppog 12y agoDriving up the Whanganui River Road in 2001: Local: "Now, that's a good possum." Me, having missed it completely: "Uh, I didn't know there were any good possums." Local: "That one was dead."
- hoggle 12y agoI hope you aimed well enough. Can you be sure not to have left behind any half-dead, suffering animals? No disrespect to you in particular but this way of handling the problem comes off as very blunt and uncivilized.
- cespare 12y agoSounded like a joke? In any case, swerving to avoid/hit a small animal is quite dangerous, and leads to crashes. If the animal isn't big enough to cause significant damage (I've heard "smaller than a medium sized dog", dunno if that's a accurate) then you shouldn't do any evasive maneuvering.
- hoggle 12y agoMost likely a sane default but I would think also strongly circumstantial depending on traffic, current speed and weather/light conditions. As the pinnacle of the animal kingdom we should be able to come up with smarter solutions. I always liked the story of Andrew Hallidie, the man behind promoting the idea of the San Franciscan Cable Car - he and his main engineer William Eppelsheimer were motivated to find a better solution to what was to a high-degree an animal welfare issue. Street cars in SF during the late 19th century used to be pulled by horses which both was dangerous for them as well as passengers: "I was largely induced to think over the matter from seeing the difficulty and pain the horses experienced in hauling the cars up Jackson Street, from Kearny to Stockton Street, on which street four or five horses were needed for the purpose–the driving being accompanied by the free use of the whip and voice, and occasionally by the horses falling and being dragged down the hill on their sides, by the car loaded with passengers sliding on its track..... .... With the view of obviating these difficulties, and for the purpose of reducing the expense of operating street railways (tram-roads), I devoted all my available time to the careful consideration of the subject, and so far matured my plans that I had California Street (a very steep street in San Francisco) surveyed [between Kearny and Powell streets, a distance of 1,386 feet] in 1870 by an engineer of the name of David R. Smith, and in the Sacramento Record, a newspaper published in the City of Sacramento, California, in 1870, a statement is there published in its telegraphic news of what I proposed to do, viz: to run a rope railway to carry passengers from the city to the plateau above." http://www.sfmuseum.org/bio/hallidie.html http://www.sfmuseum.org/bio/hallidie.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_cable_car_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_cable_car_system
- Taniwha 12y agoWhere I live in Dunedin the peninsula is the site of one of the few breeding colonies of yellow eyed penguins, and the only mainland alabtross colony in the world. They've eradicated possums back to the city limit. The Aussie possums we've been infested with are not at all like their American namesakes, they make great coats, sadly the fur-is-murder people wont make exemptions for ecological devistation.
- masklinn 12y agoGreenpeace NZ unambiguously supports and advocates hunting possums, and selling their fur.
- kijin 12y agoAccording to the wikipedia page for the "1080" pesticide [1], it can be toxic not only to mammals but also to birds and insects. What if we invented a substance that was only toxic to mammals, perhaps by targeting their unique reproductive method? Could we use something like that to eradicate all mammals from New Zealand, while taking sufficient care to protect ourselves? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_fluoroacetate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_fluoroacetate
- cconcepts 12y agoIm a kiwi in my late 20s. I spent much of my childhood and teenage years in the mountains and bush (jungles) of New Zealand hunting introduced mammals. I wouldn't have spent so much time in the bush if there weren't these mammals to hunt. I'm not a yee-haw gun toting hillbilly, I'm an educated guy who, as a young man, got so much informal education from being in the mountains trying to stalk in on Deer, Tahr, Pigs (all introduced) that I could take home and eat. It taught me resourcefulness, physical discipline, patience and survival skills. Having now traveled the world and spent many years living outside of New Zealand I have come to realize what unique abilities these are and in what a unique way us Kiwis have them. My grandfather used to tell me how appreciated us Kiwis were in World War Two for exactly these reasons. There is nothing special in our water or our climate or anything like that. We just have an incredible resource that many young kiwis have traditionally engaged, often for the purposes of recreational hunting. There is a chunk of conservation advocates who hardly engage the New Zealand outdoors, like myself (and others), yet they have a say in how it is run. They live in cities and have an idealistic but impractical understanding of our resource. The outdoors and the animals within the outdoors are a concept to these people, not a part of their lives. Some mammals in New Zealand are an absolute resource and would be easy to control if we saw them as such. We wouldn't need state sponsored poisoning runs or organized culls of NZ's large mammals if youth were shown the educational value of going out and learning how to survive, be safe, be brave, in order to hunt a deer - and then how to not waste it. I really hope the larger mammals in New Zealand remain and are treated as a resource for NZ's ambitious young people who want adventure but instead find it in playing video games and driving cars fast on public roads. I see myself as a conservationist, I just don't see the need to wind back the clock 300 years. Lets control the large mammals and protect our unique environment: the two aren't mutually exclusive.
- mcv 12y agoAccording to the article, it's not really about large mammals (which are always easier to control), but about rats and similar small, uncontrollable pests. Whatever the case, it makes every kind of sense to focus preservation efforts in NZ on saving the truly unique birds, rather than the same mammals that occur everywhere in the world. Those unique birds are the truly unique resource that New Zealand has.
- ommunist 12y agoThis is interesting heading. Humans are essentially mammals. Will extinct Kiwis reign over these two islands once again?
- disordinary 12y agoIt's a shame because you don't want to be cruel to Mammals who after all are pretty similar to us, however you also don't want to lose rare and endemic species. So its a moral dilemma, the problem is that 1080, and most poisons, are particularly horrible ways to die. It's not the animals fault that they are here, its purely our fault, yet the animals suffer. Saying that I live next to http://www.visitzealandia.com/ http://www.visitzealandia.com/ which is an inner city pest free zone in Wellington, since it was completed in the late nineties years ago the bird life in the area is amazing. It has about ten kilometres of fencing around the perimeter which is three metres tall and extends under ground.
- Ono-Sendai 12y agoI lived right beside it for a while, we had a lot of visiting birds (Tui mostly) singing in our garden.
- bitwize 12y agoSirocco was the bird that famously attempted to shag Mark Carwardine's head: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9T1vfsHYiKY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9T1vfsHYiKY
- junto 12y agoFor a minute there I thought New Zealand were about to give up all their sheep, and Wales would become the sheep rearing capital of the world!
- GFischer 12y agoI thought you were exaggerating (we have a very large stock here in Uruguay, thought we had them beat handily), but you're not: "Figures just released from the June 2012 Survey of Agriculture and Horticulture in Wales, show the total number of sheep and lambs in Wales in June was nearly 8.9 million, with lamb numbers rising by nearly 5% to 4.6 million and ewe numbers rising slightly by 1.2 % to 4.2 million." By comparison we have about 12 million sheep here in Uruguay, Argentina has 10 or 11 million, and New Zealand has about 40 million sheep. "The country has the highest density of sheep per unit area in the world. For 130 years, sheep farming was the country's most important agricultural industry, but it was overtaken by dairy farming in 1987. Sheep numbers peaked in New Zealand in 1982 to 70 million and then dropped to about 40 million." Area of Wales: 8,016 sq miles (20,761 km²) Area of Uruguay: 68,037 sq miles (176,215 km²) Area of New Zealand: 103,483 sq miles (268,021 km²) Area of Argentina: 1.074 million sq miles (2.78 million km²) Uruguay usually looks up to New Zealand as a model to follow (similar population and economy).
- d4m0 12y agoOne thing that the article fails to mention, and some comments here don't seem to understand, is that Environmental organisations such as Greenpeace NZ sanction the fur trade in some NZ mammals (eg. the possum) as they are regarded as such a destructive pest. My family has a high country farm in the south of the South Island and it used to be overrun with rabbits. Not cute; more like a biblical plague as there are no predators (aside from the occasional hawk). I recall driving up the farm road and having rabbits part in front of me like water. Crazy numbers. Don't mistake a cavalier attitude to possums/rabbits/stoats/australians for lack of civilisation. It's just a different set of circumstances than what you may have experienced.
- omeid2 12y ago> possums/rabbits/stoats/australians Australians. Huh?
- d4m0 12y agoYep. Particularly Queenslanders, victorious Aussie Sporting teams, overly attractive bikini models and other non-kiwi things.
- hoggle 12y agoIrrespective of your opinion on the complicated topic of abortion wouldn't you agree that contraceptives exemplify a more civilized approach to birth control? Maybe a bad analogy, yes but shouldn't we primarily look for solutions which prevent suffering in the first place?
- atlantic 12y agoGiven that the destructive mammals are already present, and number in the billions, wouldn't it be more efficient to introduce an extra layer of mammalian predators? That would get rid of the ones already present, or at least to keep their numbers down to manageable levels. It seems that these invasive species have become particularly destructive precisely because they are not subject to any native predators.
- SixSigma 12y agohumans are mammals, so this is what is happening
- dalke 12y agoThat was a reason for introducing some of the existing predators. It didn't work. The new predators also like the existing fauna. What other predators are left, which will kill the rats? Cats? That hasn't worked anywhere else.
- masklinn 12y ago> wouldn't it be more efficient to introduce an extra layer of mammalian predators? That's been done. The introduced extra layer went for the native wildlife, which were easier pickings.