Shooting pigeons

Forest and Bird, Issue 280, 1 May 1996, Page 2

Shooting pigeons

Director, New Zealand Fish e Game Council

W.B. Johnson

Your correspondent Chris Horne, in your February issue, is "bewildered" to read that I have "encouraged iwi to exercise their right to harvest native wildlife". Iam even more bewildered, since I have never made such statements. In early December Forest and Bird was advised in writing of my correction of the comments wrongfully attributed to me in Jacqui Barrington’s article about kereru poaching. I made a statement to the media correcting these fictions and the insults to my work and my integrity. Surely Forest and Bird had a responsibility to acknowledge my rebuttal rather than allowing Mr Horne’s attack on me to appear in your magazine unchallenged. Dr Margaret Mutu Member, New Zealand Conservation Authority Forest and Bird welcomes the assurance from Dr Mutu that she does not encourage the killing of native wildlife. However, a number of observers at a series of hui and public meetings in Northland on the Northland Conservation Management Strategy provided independent reports of Dr Mutu suggesting that the killing of native wildlife for cultural harvest purposes was legal under the Conservation Act (in that the Act must "give effect to" the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi). Dr Mutu told Kim Hill on National Radio that "kukupa are part of the food of my tribe ... part of our diet". She has told another journalist that kukupa "are part of what I expect to see

on the table when I go to the local marae". Also in her denials of evidence from DoC scientists, that hunting was risking local extinction of the bird, Dr Mutu is providing indirect encouragement to poachers. Chris Horne’s "pigeon patrol" letter (February) would no doubt be supported by this country’s wilderness anglers, who enjoy New Zealand’s natural environment with a similar passion and commitment to his own. However, Chris’ wish for pigeon funding similar to that for the Tongariro/Taupo trout fishery fails to realise that trout anglers pay taxes for pigeon conservation, in exactly the same manner as he presumably does, and also pay an additional licence fee to cover the total management costs of the Taupo fishery. Please remember that it was angler money that protected the Rakaia River for wrybill plover, and hunter money that enabled the Whangamarino wetlands to be reflooded. So let’s not have too much of this double standard where one alien species, to use Chris’ words, piously criticises the existence of another.