Special report
An article by Nicholas Holm on Academia.edu, a Californian based “platform to share, find, and explore 50 Million research papers” has highlighted the futility and illogic of general hatred of possum in New Zealand.
“Publicly decried, officially poisoned, frequently shot at and intentionally steered towards, the possum is a despised animal. Indeed, as prior writers on the subject have noted, in order to be a New Zealander, it is almost compulsory to hate the possum,” he said.
In his discourse, Nicholas Holm says those who are most committed to animal preservation and protection are those who hate possums the most.
“Hence, whereas environmental discourse normally foregrounds the protection of animals and natural environments generally, anti-animals represent the inversion of that logic whereby certain animals must be destroyed in order to conserve nature. The concept of the anti-animal is developed with reference to political theorist Carl Schmitt’s notion of the enemy/foe distinction, where the foe is an enemy who must not be simply defeated, but actively and personally hated and then eventually destroyed.”
In the second part of his article, Nicholas Holm argues that the possum’s status as anti-animal is a function of its existence at the crossroads of postcolonial and environmental ideologies.
“Commonly presented as an invasive and destructive entity, whose existence leads to the destruction of native wildlife, I argue that the possum works to distract from the environmental destruction directly wrought by pākehā colonists in Aotearoa-New Zealand,” he said.
Hooray! The possum has tiobe the most demonised creature in NZ. It’s a herbivore, not a predator, yet Predator Free NZ and DoC continually class it as a predator. DoC’s knowledge is close to zero. For decades DoC said there was 70 million possums. This was calculated by counting road kills on highways. It was way, way out. It shows DoC’s ability to deal in ideological hate, irrespective of biological realities.
I keep coming back to the fact that NZ, with a tiny percentage of the planet’s land area, uses over 90percent of world 1080 production to kill living creatures. Doesn’t that suggest something to the 1080
fanatics?
The hatred of Possums and other “introduced species” is a consequence of the Mass Psychosis that occurs as societies and civilizations decline and fall.
People with ambitions for tyrannical political authority and power promote and spread delusional ideas to confuse and undermine the conscious minds of the rest of the people they desire authority and power over.
The process is called menticide or the “killing of the mind”.
The current “mind killing” narrative is that people of European ancestry are guilty of destroying the “natural harmony” of primitive tribal societies and must atone by “decolonializing” their western societies and cultures.
This atonement for the crimes of our ancestors is to be achieved by granting the descendants of “indigenous people” unequal rights, privileges, advantages of public funds, adopting primitive customs and beliefs and sacrificing “introduced species” as a ritual of atonement for our guilt.
The hatred of possums is symbolic of the hatred we are encouraged to have toward ourselves and western civilization.
The idea that pre-colonial New Zealand was an Utopian Paradise that must be restored by all possible means is, of course, a delusion and denial of rational thinking.
It is as absurd and delusional as the notion that children of all ancestry and cultures must be indoctrinated with Maori language, culture, beliefs and traditions, to avoid accusations of racism for respecting their own ancestry.
The menticide and promotion of Mass Psychosis has been so successful that most people do not even accept the reality that there are only 2 sexes or genders called male and female.
The possum research station, just out of Wellington, in 20 years of study, have never found any indication that possums are anything other than vegetarians. I personally have autopsied hundreds of possums, specifically to find out what they have been feeding on. Never once have I found anything to suggest they eat anything other than vegetation. I did my first 1080 drop 27 years before DOC even cam into being and I am fully aware that DOC has manipulated the system to suit the continued and widespread use of 1080 Poison. They would never have got public support without misleading the public in relation to possums being carnivorous. I believe that the time has come for DOC to get out of pest control in New Zealand.
A couple of years ago, I ran a series of experiments (published on CORANZ as a 4 part series) to see if Possums really do like eggs!
Result: They’ll eat anything but the actual egg itself!
I encourage any who doubt the results to simply conduct the experiment for yourself and try prove me wrong…
Possums don’t have a problem co-existing with native species in their native Australia, so why would they here?
Strikes me there is a whole phobia and huge monetary prize to be gained by painting these harmless herbivores as pests – millions of dollars in public tax-payer funds diverted to combat a mythical “pest”.
Trouble is, all the while spreading poisons willy-nilly around the place, our native fauna (and flora) are being decimated. Bird species once so widespread (Kea even having a bounty placed on their heads at one time) are now facing extinction thanks to the zealous overreach of the mass poison industry.
As always, in any modern “science” – Follow the Money!!!!
I do see possums as a problem to plantation (i.e. pine) forests, as they do love to nibble out the soft top shoots of freshly planted saplings. But once established the possum has no real impact on pines.
Likewise native species. I have seen many so called “examples” of possum destruction to Rata, Rimu etc, but on closer examination other forces are at play – the possum just naturally gets blamed because it is an easy scapegoat and saves all that laborious effort to identify the true cause.
I am fortunate to be surrounded by possums (and mustelids, hedgehogs etc) but with abundant birdlife – both native and exotic. The raptors especially thrive here.
AND NO 1080
People blame scattered five finger leaves on the ground as the work of possums. It’s actually the work of native pigeons (kereru) which are vegetarian as were kokako and of course moa and other avian species.
And for that matter possums are herbivores not predators although I note DOC and ideological groups like Predator Free NZ , still lump possums under the predator banner.
There is Landcare Research studies where no remains of birds, eggs etc., were found in a good number of possum stomachs autopsied.
As for TB, it too is a policy riddled with lies and deception. OSPRI uses the skin test to detect Tb in stock but it has an error rate 25-30%. So infected animals are wrongly passed as clear and put back in the herd to infect and other cattle whose immune system is faltering.
It is a matter of deception so salaries and empires can continue.