Hunters and Trappers

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 650, 14 December 1951, Page 26

Hunters and Trappers

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SUNDOWNER

NOVEMBER 13

IVE months after it was printed and published I have seen today a summary of the report of a Committee appointed two years ago by Mr. Attlee "to incuire into practices and activities which may involve cruelty to British wild mammals," I have also seen in the Countryman some comments by

authorities which are politely but provocatively con-

'tradictory. Those who want restrictive | legislation seem convinced that they will not get it. and those who fear legislation seem to be afraid that it will come. Until I have seen the report itself I can’t pretend to have opinions about it, but I have a very strong wish that our booksellers will import and circulate it (Cmd. 8266, H.M.S.O., 3/6). The "wild mammals" of New Zealand have, of course, all been imported -trabbits, deer, opossums, chamois, and thar; with the few cattle and horses, and thousands of pigs and goats, that have gone wild since they were domesticated. We have no foxes and badgers, and therefore no fox and badger hunting. We have hares, and on a certain social-financial level a few groups of men and women who hunt them with horses and hounds, I don’t think they disturb the hares much, inflict much cruelty on them, or appreciably reduce their numbers. Cruelty to wild animals in New Zealand-if in the meantime we except biological warfare-means shooting, trapping, and poisoning, and it | would be the best news of the century

(in the domestic sphere) if someone could tell us how to stop. % BA *

NOVEMBER 14

T is clear, I think, from the comments in the Countryman, that Mr. Attlee’s Committee has nothing to say about the steel trap that will cause its disappearance from New Zealand. It suggests-perhaps recommends-perhaps urges--perhaps strongly demands (I await the full report)-that the gin trap should be banned by law on account

of its admitted cruelty, and that the design of any

other spring trap used should have Ministerial appreval. That sounds like a step. forward, and in Britain probably is. But means next to nothing here. Whatever the Committee’s precise words are about traps, its guiding principle is that cruelty begins when more suffering is inflicted on wild animals than is necessary in protecting the farmer’s crops and the nation’s food supply. We must read the two clauses together, and as soon as we do that in New Zealand we are back where we have been for 70 years. Traps are used here not because they will eradicate rabbits, not because we are indifferent to cruelty (though habit and necessity have calloused most farmers), not because they ate an easy or convenient or certain method of control, but because they give farmers some degree of control when other (also cruel) methods fail. They will disappear when rabbits disappear or some: easier and cheaper method is found for eradicating them. In the meantime, I am disappointed to

have it on authority of one of the experts who comment on the report that the humane spring trap is a delusion. * %

NOVEMBER 15

MEETING Gordon at the Show last week made it the best show I have attended for a long time. Fifteen years ago we were neighbours, and met and talked nearly every day; but I lost him when I went north and he went south, and for a dozen years I had hardly seen him. Then I ran into him in the cattle

pens and the day became what every Show day ought

to be---a profitable picnic. All men change with time; but Gordon changes less than anyone else I can think of, both in body and in spirit. I have wondered sometimes what he does} to defeat time, but have always reached the same answer: nothing. He is too healthy to require a prescription, too honest to play any tricks. He looks young because he remains young, in his mind and heart, and especially, I think, -because he has never been jealous, bitter, or mean. It interested me to notice how many people (men and women) seemed to know him, how many stopped and shook hands with him, and how often his smile lit them up as it has always lit me up and lightened my-»step for a yard or two. That is the Gordon who was born and not made. But there is a made Gordon too, as there is a made Jim, and both Were made in the same factory: Lincoln College. I could not help remembering as I walked round with him, listening to his comments on the exhibits and on farm problems generally, that coNege trainees used to be the farmers’ richest joke; that when one appeared in a ‘district for the first time he was either laughed out or sneered out or frozen out, of driven so sharply in on himself that his confidence quickly left him. It was certainly like that where I grew up myself, and there was more in it ‘than jealousy, ignorance and a peasant-mind-edness. The college farmer of those days often was a joke. His fences were a joke; his stooks; his stacks; his drills and plough furrows. Today he is the leaven in the lump of tradition that is the avetage farmer’s whole theory and practice. To walk round the Show with Gordon was like walking round his farm with Jim: it made me feel that the stream of agricultutal knowledge has begun to flow again. Instead of the deep and dark stagnation of my youth I saw movement, and now and again a pleasant sound, (To be continued)