While I agree that SAFE have been great in highlighting the cruelty around pig crates, SAFE are totally clueless about pest control. They simply fail to understand the urgency there is to save the utterly vulnerable native plants and animals that are being wiped out by possums, rats and stoats everywhere where there is no pest control being carried out.
Listen to this SAFE nonsense that Kukupa has uncovered:
"SAFE is also opposed to other control methods such as ‘instant' kill traps, electro-shock traps and other poisons. Trapping, poisoning, shooting and other commonly used population control methods provide only short-term solutions to reducing possum populations and involve methods that cause suffering.
SAFE believes it is our responsibility to treat these animals fairly and humanely. The key viable alternative would be the use of fertility control which would slowly reduce numbers over time. This has proven effective in other countries, such as on populations of unwanted animals like wild horses and deer in the US.
Landcare Research has been working on developing contraceptive control of possum for many years, stating that it could be more effective than current methods. Using biological control as well as conventional control will slow down the rate at which possum numbers build up. We estimate that such integrated possum control might need to be done only one-third as often as current control with poisons or traps alone."
If, like SAFE, we all had the luxury to sit back and pontificate about the ideal world of pest control we could all "play SAFE" and opt for further research into an untried and tested technique such as "Possum, stoat and rat contraceptive control".
Undoubtedly the world's best scientific resources have spent billions already unsuccessfully seeking such a solution for rats over recent decades. Rats cause untold misery to many of the world's most vulnerable people by devastating food stocks and spreading disease.
We don't have SAFE's indulgent luxury. To do nothing effective about pest control right now is to condemn many of our most vulnerable native plants and animals to almost certain extinction and I will give some examples below:
Fact 1 Scarlet Mistletoe Peraxilla colensoi hundreds of years old was virtually all eliminated within 3 years from South Westland beech forest trial areas where there was no possum control. SAFE admits that its proposed contraceptive methods are years away. SAFE are therefore saying that we should simply sit idly by and allow to disappear this marvellous red sentinel of our beech forest that also provides vital food for kaka? From these same forests in the same study, wineberry, rata and fuchsia disappeared at almost the same rapid rate because of possum browse. DOC is saving new Zealand's premier examples of scarlet mistletoe in Southern South Westland ....and not coincidentally also saving the best populations of South Island Kaka. The Landsborough and the Hope Rivers are outstanding examples of the success of aerial 1080 in saving biodiversity.
Fact 2. Kaka, the venerable wise old parrots of the forest, referred to as the "clowns of the forest" by Mr Explorer Douglas are being totally wiped out everywhere that there is no pest control. That is why DOC is this year determinedly pushing ahead with its 1080 operations over 25,000hectares of the Waitutu Forest, 35,000 heactres of the Cascade to Gorge River forests and 30,000 hectares of the Moeraki to Haast forests this year. It knows that this is almost the last possible chance for the South Island kaka to have a secure future.
Fact 3. Western Weka are thriving almost exclusively in those forests that have received extensive 1080 pest control from DOC and the Animal Health Board. Mostly these are in North Westland-Buller. This seems likely to be because weka are so vulnerable to stoat predation and only intensive pest control, usually with 1080, is effective at killing stoats through a secondary kill. I watched weka today on the summit of Arthur's Pass. Here, over the last 5 years, weka have been colonising the Bealey Valley from the Otira Valley, perhaps the most heavily 1080 poisoned valley in New Zealand that has been regularly treated with 1080 for nearly 50 years.
In Golden Bay where 1080 operations have been severely restricted (ironically by Green Party led protests) weka have almost become extinct yet 30 years ago they were abundant here.
FACT 4 Mohua/yellowhead will almost certainly become extinct on mainland NZ unless aerial 1080 continues to be used to kill rats, the main predator of these endearing endemic native birds. Mohua have staged a major comeback in the Landsborough Valley because of DOC's ongoing aerial 1080 operations here. In untreated valleys nearby where there has been no pest control mohua have become extinct over the last 30 years.
