POSSUM POGROM

New Zealand Wages War on Oldest Living Creature

By Simon Ward

Possums are as much a part of New Zealand culture as rata trees, rugby and sheep. Dead possums, that is. Whether they're in landfills, in bin liners dumped by the roadside, or stuffed up the exhaust of the boss's car, a New Zealander can't sneeze without encountering a dead possum.

And it's all part of New Zealand's clean, green image: home of the greatest VERTEBRATE SLAUGHTER on Earth.

For 80 million years, vast herds of possums roamed the forests of Gondwana, evolving a complex social structure and repertoire of song and dance routines. And then just one million years ago - a second in the life of a possum - man arrived and populated Australia with convicts. Now the possum herds have been reduced to relict populations in just three places - Australia, New Zealand, the US, and some other smaller places.

But how much longer can they hold on?

Australia has thankfully seen the light, and now protects the possum throughout much of its range. Although Aussies still shoot 3.2 million kangaroos a year and export live sheep in sinking ships, the Great Australian Possum Sanctuary is hailed as a breakthrough by conservationists, providing vital protection from the threats of pollution, climate change, and drunken Aussies with bee-bee guns.

But the biggest threat facing possums is those guys across the Tasman, who have pledged to  wipe possums off the face of the Earth ... and they call it "conservation"!

60 Million Dead

The scale of New Zealand's death toll is hard to gauge, because of the nature of the killing methods used, and because dead possums are no longer utilised sustainably for their fur and meat, but are chucked in bushes or used to polish cars.

The last reliable statistics come from the period 1951-61, when the government paid bounties to hunters on more than 8 million dead possums - and those were only the adults. Since a mother possum may carry as many as 13 babies, the bounty hunters could have taken the lives of 60 MILLION POSSUMS!!

And who pays for this carnage? YOU DO! Every year, the government spends NZ$29 million of taxpayers' money on poisoning and trapping possums, and a further $8 million on research into more efficient killing methods. Add to that $19 million spent by farmers, and you have $56 million being spent EVERY YEAR, just to kill possums!

Feeble Excuses

Why do they do it? Here are just some of the feeble excuses offered by New Zealand's Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF) for this travesty of wildlife management:

• New Zealand has about 70 million possums, says the MAF. FACT: Possum population models are notoriously inaccurate, and no independent verification of this figure has ever been made.

Actually, the MAF doesn't even know for sure how many species of possum there are! As recently as the 1960s, two possum species previously thought to be extinct - the burramys and the scaly-tailed possum - were rediscovered in Australia, and could even now be dodging traps in New Zealand. If this sounds unlikely, consider the case of the white-throated wallaby. Once common in New South Wales, Australia, by the 1930s it was thought to have gone extinct. But in 1966 it turned up again - in New Zealand!

• The MAF calls possums an "enormous" environmental threat, consuming "about 22,000 tonnes of our forests every night. The forests cannot keep up; possums are eat- ing out all the canopy of native forests, causing them to collapse." FACT: Possums play a vital role in protecting the environment by eating garden snails, slugs, insects, rats, carrion and over-ripe fruit. And anyway, how can an animal the size of a mouse eat 22,000 tonnes of forest?!?

• The MAF claims that possums are a major source of bovine tuberculosis infection for cattle and deer, putting "beef, deer and dairy trade currently worth $5 billion at risk." FACT: Infected possums are only found over about 25% of New Zealand. Over the remaining 75% of the possum's range, Tb is spread primarily by ferrets and pigs, but still the possums are persecuted.

Nazi Methods

New Zealand's cavalier attitude to conservation has been condemned by all the civilised world, but nothing has done more to outrage WORLD OPINION than the methods used for its possum pogrom.

The most common method is to poison possums with the compound sodium monofluoroacetate, or 1080, which the MAF says was first developed for pest control in Poland in the 1930s. But according to the Progressive Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) of the US, it was actually developed by the Nazis, whose definition of "pest" was, as we know, fairly broad.

In 1993, the MAF compiled a report entitled "1080: Some Answers to Frequently Asked Questions", which mixes feel-good hype about 1080 with some astonishingly frank observations.

The report describes 1080 as a "natural plant toxin" that is "weight for weight ... safer than uncooked baked beans."

Sounds good, except for two things. First, there's no such thing as an "uncooked baked bean", or obviously they would be used to poison possums. And second, in the US 1080 is classified as "super toxic", which is why its use is highly restricted there. And since there is only one factory in the world producing 1080, and it's in the US, the Americans should know.

To its credit, however, the MAF admits that 1080 is less than perfect.

A particular problem is the "quality" of death, which results from cardiac failure, progressive failure of the central nervous system, or respiratory arrest following severe and prolonged convulsions. The MAF describes this death as "slow and painful".

The MAF also acknowledges that 1080 is not species-specific, with "numerous documented fatalities of dogs, livestock, cats and birds." Dogs, in particular, are vulnerable, having between 5 and 45 times less resistance to 1080 than possums.

Leg-Hold Traps

The other preferred method of possum extermination is the leghold trap, which restrains an animal rather than killing it. The world's foremost authority on trapping standards, the International Fund for Animal Welfare, describes this method as follows:

"The leghold trap ... snaps shut on the creature's leg, cutting into its skin and bone so tightly it cannot escape. Animals can be left in traps for days and often suffer a prolonged and painful death from their injuries or from exposure before the trapper returns. Many animals will even chew off their own leg in order to escape from the traps."

Nice, huh?

As a token gesture to animal welfarists, in 1995 the New Zealand government decreed that trappers should replace legholds known as "gin" traps, which cause severe bone fractures, with padded leghold traps, which only cause bruising. But the terrified possum must still wait for a day or more before someone arrives to stomp on his head.

Myxomatosis

Belatedly, the government is now researching methods to control the fertility of possums, but there is still a long way to go.

In order to allay public concerns about a genetically engineered virus breaking out, the government has rightly set itself stringent criteria. Among these, the control agent must be possumspecific, and the vaccine that it carries must cause infertility in possums only. Furthermore, the vaccine must not be able to survive away from possums to prevent it crossing the Tasman and infecting Australian possums.

Because of the difficulties involved in developing such a control agent, New Zealanders will continue for the time being to poison, trap, shoot, stomp and generally dismember and mutilate every possum they see.

But at least they'll be saving the whales.

Did you know?

Like humans and most primates, possums have opposable thumbs on their rear feet, enabling them to pick their noses and write at the same time. Whales are incapable of doing either.

• Whales have been around for 30 million years - longer than anything on the planet except possums, which have been around for 70-80 million years. The average possum brain holds more inherited knowledge about our planet’s history than the Library of Congress.

• When threatened, possums are known to "play possum". This coma-like state can last up to four hours, during which time the possum will become stiff, drool, and have extremely slow, shallow breathing. The same state can be induced in IWC delegates by raising the subject of whale watching.

• Few countries can match New Zealand’s record for poisoning, either in terms of the number of animals killed or in terms of efficiency. Perhaps its greatest achievement was in 1996, when the Department of "Conservation" exterminated the entire rat population of Kapiti Island.

In addition to poisoning small mammals and birds, it also poisons large mammals with highly developed nervous systems, such as feral cats, wallabies, deer, pigs and goats.