Poison Laid for Pigs

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 888, 10 August 1956, Page 9

Poison Laid for Pigs

by

SUNDOWNER

JULY 8

T was a little strange to read in a newspaper report a few days ago that the Wild Life Division of the Department of Internal Affairs is conducting an "experiment" in poisoning wild pigs. It is certainly experimental to kill a horse for baits when there were apparently old rams available, and to

"cTawi into gore, Drool and scrub" to lay the baits where the pigs would find

them. But pigs have been poisoned, and have poisoned themselves, since the first bait was laid for rabbits. A very small quantity of phosphorus will kill them -even the small quantity remaining in the stomach of a dead rabbit, I know that there are exceptions in these cases, as there are with all poisons, but every rabbiter who has laid poisoned pollard or oats in pig country knows what happens when the pigs find his line. Every farmer knows, too, what can happen if pollard and grain are laid where sheep can readily find them. But sheep are not fond of dead horse, dead opossums, or dead rams, and I can’t think why the experimenters are going to such trouble to place their baits on tracks and beds that can only be treated as crawling. If it is done to avoid poisoning dogs, the danger is not on the placing of the bait but in allowing dogs to wander. If the purpose is to leave the bait where the pigs will find it, that is hate’s labour lost. A dead horse will carry its own message to every pig within half a mile, and dead rams are only a little less eloquent. The nose of a pig is as efficient as the nose of a dog, and a pig’s appetite is considerably less selective than a dog’s. Pigs will, in fact, provide their own bait where no other flesh is available. I am not sure how common it is for pigs to clean up their own dead, but I have been in pig country-not hungry scrub country, but country with abundance of flax, fern and swamp-where every pig, a month after it was shot, was a few big bones, and a snout inside a turned-out skin. When he shot a

pig the owner of that run made a deep cut from end to end on both sides and dusted in strychnine. This, I remember, was not effective immediately, since putrefaction was necessary before cannibalism began, but the result in a few weeks would be anything up to a dozen new carcases within a hundred yards of the first. It was a great surprise to me to discover that the pigs there were cannibals, but thé owner of the country, who had lived in Burma but nowhere else in New Zealand, found it just as difficult to believe that they were not cannibals everywhere.

JULY 11

* cd Ld a7 HAT did you do," I was asked this morning when I refused to talk during the weather broadcast, "before the weather forecasting began?" What did I do? I suppose I read the newspaper forecasts, supplied by prophets who had theif own methods of reading

e skies, and WU anyone I knew had a barometer I would ask him what "the

glass" had to say. ihe glass-1 you were well enough off to own one-occu-pied about the same position in the household as a stethoscope in the ears of a doctor or a tuning-fork in the hands of a tonic sol-fa singer. It could not be wrong, but you had to spend many years tapping it and gazing at it before you could be sure what it said. One of my uncles was the only glass owner near us when we were young, and he did not doubt any more than we did that it made him a weather oracle. It did not occur to me then that we could all have been oracles if we had saved five pounds, but we were never able to do that, and uncle’s halo remained. Although the glass gave three signs only -that it was falling, that it was not falling, that it was rising: it and not the mercury or the pressure-the interpretation of these signs was in the last degree mysterious. First uncle looked at the sky to see what the weather would have been if he had not possessed a glass. Then he looked at the glass,

tapped it, watched, put on his secret-up-the-sleeve look, and went outside again for the confirmation of sky, clouds, wind and temperature. Then, till the next day, his confidence remained unshaken. If rain came on a rising glass or failed when the glass fell, it was not the glass that was at fault or uncle. The sun or rain had been delayed a little, but would come; as, sooner or later, it always did. But the day also came when one of my sisters read in Handy Hints that it was possible to make a barometer out of two jam jars, and she was irrevent enough to try. She had been a favourite with uncle before this lapse, but I don’t think she quite regained her place afterwards. In any case, though he died rich, for those days very rich, there was nothing in his will that encouraged Janet to break her jam bottles. os

JULY 13

— ] WAS shown today a very beautiful stole made out of six ferret skins. But they were not ferrets in the stole. They were fitches, and.I have been wondering since when a ferret is a fitch and a fitch a ferret. The answer seems to be when neither is a polecat.

I am too old to start using new names for animals I have known all my life

under another name, but as I have never called any creature a fitch, I should like to know precisely what a fitch is now that the Wild Life Division has introduced the name. There are no fitches in the Encyclopaedia Britannica or in Lydekker’s Wild Life. In the Oxford Dictionary a fitch is not an animal but a fur. If it is now the animal that produces the fur-the ancient fitchewwhich of our New Zealand animals is a fitch, which a ferret, and which a polecat? I am not going to be told that I should call a ferret a fitch unless I can also be told what a fitch is, and what the difference is between a ferret and a polecat. Is there a difference, or is a ferret in New Zealand a polecat, some of whose ancestors were reared in a box? I have been told that only white ferrets are true ferrets, but as there is no other difference between a white ferret and a brown, and thy interbreed, I suspect that they are the same animal. We believed, when we were boys, that white ferrets were lazy and brown ferrets lighter and livelier. I think the difference was one of sex. A’ white buck was less active than a brown doe, but colour made no difference in the same sex at the same age. The nearest I have been able to get to the scientific cifferences between ferrets and polecats is a statement I have seen somewhere that polecats have broader skulls. This, it was explained, was due to the fact that polecats were wild animals, compelled to use their jaw and face muscles vigorously, while ferrets were domestic animals fed largely on pap (milk, liver, bread, meat scraps, etc.). That would not make them different animals any more than occupation makes a carpenter a different animal from a clerk. In any case, nine out of ten of the ferrets first sent to New Zealand must have been pap-fed, while 99 ont of a hundred of those here now are wild and fend for themselves. IT am not going to call them fitches for no other reason than because experts can’t distinguish one animal from another. I hone. too, if a distinction is some day established, that it will be more convincing than the geogravhical distinction offered now -that ferrets belong to the Mediterranean countries, polecats to the countries farther north. (To be continued)