Predator Free 2050 and The Call to Arms

By Dr. Lynley Tulloch

New Zealand’s Predator Free 2050 goal includes encouraging community-led projects to kill possums, rats and stoats. Nicola Toki, New Zealand’s Endangered Wildlife Ambassador, claims that it is important that New Zealanders get on board with the mantra to kill introduced species. It is the only way, she says, to give our endangered flora and fauna a chance of survival.

This logic is so entrenched in New Zealander’s psyches that very few dare to question it. In fact, suggesting that we look at the issue from another angle is akin to being regarded as a dope-smoking hippy greenie from the Coromandel at best. At worst you become subject to rape and death threats, and clandestine plans on social media pages to have dead possums dumped on your driveway. I’ve had them all.

Yet here I stand. A New Zealander who does not believe we should be killing possums in the name of conservation. I may as well be a modern-day witch. Despite the pressure on me to conform lest I am burned at the stake, I have no intention of backing down. I simply don’t believe that killing is the only answer to New Zealand’s biodiversity problems.

I am very much in the minority. The drive to muster the troops against possums and other introduced animals has most New Zealanders, including children, swearing allegiance to the Department of Conservation. In fact, while researching this issue I discovered that getting public buy - in and involvement in the Predator - Free 2050 goal was regarded as crucial to its success.

The battle cry has been relentless. It has now reached a deafening crescendo reminiscent of the dawn chorus of birds heard by James Banks, the botanist on Captain James Cooks first expedition to New Zealand in 1770. That chorus has now been reduced to the occasional solitary tweet in our remaining forests, drenched regularly by aerial droppings of 1080 poison. A poison, I might add, that is both sanctioned and promoted by the Department of Conservation.

But I digress from my main topic of the battle cry. This war is one of positions - humans on one side (with their beloved native feathery friends) and possums and other mammalian ‘pests’ on the other. The war rhetoric is laced with ideological justifications and dogma. It is backed by iffy science and attempts to demonise the possum.

The war cry has been building in New Zealand since the 1980s, when conservationists labelled introduced species as “invasive species”. Fast forward to August 2013 when Nicola Toki invited all New Zealanders to "go home and snot some small furry animal" . In the same article Toki is also quoted as saying she thought that a Predator -Free 2050 goal was “a pretty easy sell” as “[w]e relate our national identity to our native wildlife. And everyone hates possums”

Today Toki claims she has had a change of heart. In a recent essay entitled Killing with kindness she observed that her previous attitude was “flippant and unkind. It's not easy to kill another living thing, and nor should it be”.

And yet children in New Zealand are regularly encouraged to trap and kill possums during school fundraisers. if you look at the grinning faces of New Zealand children dressing up dead possums during these events you could be forgiven for thinking it was an enjoyable affair. An article by Christina Persico earlier this year clearly illustrated the carnivalesque atmosphere at the Uruti School possum and pig hunting fundraiser. One child is photographed carrying a dead possum by his tail during a hurdle race.

In her recent essay Nicola Toki defends similar pictures of children grinning while "thrusting a squashed stoat toward the camera". She claims that the children are celebrating that they are one step closer to restoring New Zealand’s native wildlife. As Marc Bekoff suggests, there is no way she can know this is the reason they are smiling "unless they were asked ... which as far as I can determine they weren't" . The issue of smiling hunters next to their trophies , he says, is far more complex. Toki goes on to suggest that we should reflect on an animal’s life when we kill them, pay reverence to their life and also to kill them with kindness – “we mustn’t lose our hearts”.

Nicola Toki’s 180 degree turn on ‘snotting furry animals’ to ‘killing them with kindness’ raised a red flag for me. Toki is riding the wave of international outrage at social media images of New Zealand school children involved in killing sprees. New Zealand has recently been on the receiving end of negative international news coverage after a petition to stop Orini School possum hunt was successful. The petition entitled "stop sickening school 'possum hunt' where children are encouraged to kill’ garnered 13,667 supporters, most of them from overseas. And a school possum hunt in Drury hit international headlines after possum joeys were drowned in a bucket of water.

Toki dismisses this outrage on the basis that international people do not know that possums are such a big threat to our native wildlife. She did concede in a recent radio interview that drowning joeys was wrongful as it was an inhumane way to ‘dispatch’ them.

Herein lies a complex and muddled web of skewed ethics. As Mar Bekoff , who has written numerous articles on New Zealand’s ‘war on wildlife’ , recently argued that killing animals in the name of conservation remains incredibly inhumane and should be stopped. Simply put, there is no humane way to kill a healthy animal who does not want to die. Possums will suffer in traps, being shot and being poisoned with 1080. In addition, the indiscriminate use of 1080 will in the unintended by-kill of native birds, farmed animals, dogs and cats. Baby joeys will slowly die of starvation and cold in the pouches of their dead mothers.

We need to back up the truck (watching out for possums on the way). It’s not ok to deliberately hurt an animal, glorify in its death and promote hatred. Yet that is what we are teaching our children as we prime them for the war on ‘pests’. Killing animals is not a family fun day out.

Research needs to be directed into methods such as immunocontraception to reduce possum breeding. This is perhaps a more effective method of control as poison and traps often leads to short term drops in the population, less competition for food and nest sites and a boom in breeding.

And we need to teach our children compassion, not cruelty.

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