Economy
NZ: Zero Invasive Predators … and Scientists
A bunch of “scientists”, working under the acronym ZIP (Zero Invasive Predators), are not out to save any particular species, nor to assist in the balance of nature; their aim is to make NZ predator-free.
The scientists have yet to explain why this is a good idea. They are simply charging ahead with a ZIP mentality which looks to deny rather than work with evolution. They are being handsomely paid to book.
As our local enviro-group coordinator says these “scientists” “seem to have license to explore any zany idea”. This license comes from central government which gave them another $600,000 in this year’s budget.
Every year Research and Development into NZ’s animal control gets a massive $13 million of public money. For all this money something very substantial must be expected. There have never been so many “scientists” on the payroll and the payroll has never been so large.
There are only so many animals.
How many people does it take?
What is taking the money is government’s determination to do a simple trapping job with poison.
If you put $13 million into trapping possums you would control 1.3 million hectares, twice the area DOC covered last year with aerial 1080 and at half DOC’s cost of $27 million. Instead that $13 million is being poured into animal poison research which has produced little of use in the past ten or fifteen years. This kind of research has no end in sight and no known purpose beyond greed itself. Ask ’em what they intend to achieve and their answer, ZIP, pretty much covers it.
It is sad to see well-intentioned enviro-groups being used for these scientists’ poison trials.
Huge boat-loads of NZ’s animal poisons have been sent to be spread poison on remote islands in our southern oceans ‘cos most of NZ’s closer islands have already been poisoned. It is the same on land.
Fewer and fewer spaces on the map have not already been poisoned.
When Connovation released their Sodium Nitrite this year they had to take their product to the other end of the country, to Otago Peninsula, before they found an enviro-group that wasn’t already spreading someone’s animal poison product.
Sodium nitrite is a pig poison yet Connovation has released it as a possum poison. No sales in NZ for another pig poison.
Sodium Nitrite is a registered with EPA as a pig killer. ACTA (Animal Control Technologies Australia) sells it as a pig killer called Hoggone. ACTA’s “science” explains why Sodium Nitrite would be a great pig killer.
The same science which says that 1080 is suited to killing dingoes says that Sodium Nitrite is suited to killing pigs. It takes the smallest amount of 1080 to kill a dingo and the smallest amount of Sodium Nitrite to kill a pig.
You can kill your dingo or your pig with such a small dose that, if other creatures in the forest accidentally eat a bait they should receive a sub-lethal dose and not be killed.
In NZ the ideal dingo poison, 1080, is being used to poison possums. Possums are relatively resistant to 1080 so the dose required to kill a possum is absurdly large – enough to kill a dozen or more dogs and who knows how many other forest creatures as well.
Possums are even more resistant to sodium nitrite than they are to 1080 so what’s the logic?
Science says that, because of the huge doses required, neither 1080 nor Sodium Nitrite are suitable for poisoning possums.
Our government tells us they are being led by science and yet here they are completely ignoring the science and willfully encouraging the distribution of poisons known to be unsuitable for the purpose they are being put.
The tens of millions of NZ dollars poured annually into a direction which flies in the face of science indicate motives other than environmental care.
*John Veysey lives on the Coromandel Peninsula on the North Island, New Zealand. Since first observing government-funded animal poisoning operations in his area John has spent the past 25 years looking to find any tangible benefits to the environment, long or short term, from this method of wild animal control. After decades studying the “science” behind NZ’s animal poisoning policy John has uncovered numerous benefits but none of them, he says, have been for the environment.
• In TT Media: Minister seriously misleading public over 1080
EARLIER on Tasmanian Times …