The Madness Of “Predator Free NZ” And Doc’s 1080 Poison Campaign

A post from 2017, written for Fish and Game Magazine in 2017. It was refused publication.

The debate around Predator Free New Zealand and the use of 1080 remains one of the most contested areas of environmental policy. Strong views exist on all sides, and public understanding is often shaped as much by narrative as by science.

The following article, written in 2017 by former Otago Fish and Game councillor Dave Witherow, was not published at the time. It represents a sharply critical perspective on current conservation approaches, particularly the use of toxins and the framing of “native versus introduced” species.

Some of the language may seem highly emotive but we include unabridged without comment.

We publish it here not as settled fact, but as part of a wider conversation that continues to divide opinion. Readers will draw their own conclusions.

Many years ago, on a hunting trip at Mason Bay on Stewart Island, I had an encounter with galaxids. I was cleaning the billies in a pool in the creek at the northern end of the beach, beside the old driftwood bivvy, and there were a few peas on the bottom of the pool when I was finished. I went back through the dunes to the bivvy, and a few minutes later, when I returned to get some water, there were these curious little fish swimming around the pool. They were galaxids – not the legendary giant ones, which are rumoured to have reached nearly a pound in weight (although, like most fisher’s tales, that’s probably an exaggeration). These were much smaller – about the size of an average cigar. They were eating the peas, scooping them up from the bottom one by one, and when the peas were finished they buggered off and never came back, even though I baited the pool with fresh peas for days. Maybe the peas disagreed with them, but anyway I never saw another one, and apart from numerous feeds of whitebait, that’s my total experience with galaxids.

I was reminded of this a few days ago while listening to a young woman from the Department of Conservation explain on the radio what a terrible menace trout were in New Zealand’s rivers. Trout were predators, she said, invaders, colonists, and they were ruthlessly wiping out the vulnerable, trusting native species, including the galaxids. These trout, she said, were irredeemable villains, and ought to be exterminated. (And would, in fact, have been exterminated ages ago, were it not for the uproar it would cause from benighted anglers).

And it’s not just the trout that are causing grief. There’s the ducks – the wily mallard especially. This evil creature, as all right-thinking people are well aware, is flying around quite unhindered and inseminating the innocent unsuspecting native ducks and contaminating the pure waters of the native gene pool to the disgraceful extent that nowadays its hard to find a genuine native anywhere. (The mallards, needless to say, would have been exterminated long ago were it not for the uproar it would cause from benighted hunters).

It gets worse. Think of the deer, the tahr, the chamois – horrible and unprincipled creatures whose one and only purpose in life is to eat defenseless native plants and loosen the soil and bring whole native mountainsides crashing down into threatened native rivers.

And then there are the smaller vermin: stoats and weasels – bloodthirsty little menaces, massacring the indigenous birdlife and raising families all up and down the country. There are plagues of mice when the beech-seed falls, followed by rats and ferrets and tabby-cats run wild. It’s bedlam out there in the forest.

And it’s not much better anywhere else. Thistles and brambles have taken over the farmland. There’s ragweed, gorse, Old-Mans-Beard in the shrubbery and hieracium higher up. The whole place is a seething battleground and everywhere the natives are losing. Your own back garden is no exception. Not a kiwi or weka to be seen – not a kokako or takahe. These wholesome and lovely creatures are gone, but there are blackbirds singing everywhere. Thrushes tuning up in the morning light, sparrows nesting in the eaves. Aliens and enemies, the length and breadth of the land.

It is a total disgrace, that’s what it is. But don’t worry, because at long last, DOC is doing something about it. Before many more years have passed, if all goes well, these sore-pressed islands will be restored to their original pristine glory. The song of the huia will be heard again. The cat will be dead, the rat likewise, and the possum will be history.

In contemplating the current devastation it is sobering to remember that the extermination of our native fauna and flora was no-one’s fault but our own. We imported every one of these loathsome aliens. And even now there are people like Fish and Game – backed by its legion of bloodthirsty loons – who refuse to acknowledge their criminal role in this tragic story. But these delinquents have no credibility. Like the dinosaurs their day is over.

**

The challenge could hardly be simpler. Every alien must be destroyed, down to the very last rodent. Improved weapons will make this possible – although these weapons, it is true, have not yet been invented. But genetic science knows no bounds, and one day soon the average West Coast stoat will be a sterile runt, riddled with lethal mutations. Our infested streams will be cleared of trout, and long-dead native species – reconstituted from fossil DNA – will eventually replace the invaders.

The battle has begun in earnest. Old strategies have been discarded, and DOC – long-distracted by tedious procedures in the Environment Courts – has abandoned such frivolities to concentrate on its new vision of a gleaming future via a nationwide blitz of poison. Already the Department has a stockpile sufficient to kill every inhabitant of this country and Australia combined. But this is just the beginning. No corner of New Zealand will be neglected. A new dawn beckons at last.

Let us begin with very simple things. Trout have not exterminated galaxids. There are still plenty of galaxids in our streams – millions of them in the case of whitebait – and the main problems they face have nothing to do with predation by trout. Galaxids are just one genus among a myriad of aquatic organisms that need clean fresh water to survive – water that is disappearing at a record rate, for reasons that are now front page news in our daily papers. And DOC, for all its feigned concern about native fish, is doing practically nothing about this.

As an agency of conservation DOC has become almost irrelevant. It has been gelded, intimidated, starved of money. Its priorities now are cultivating the tourist industry, and sucking up to the government of the day. Water is too hot an issue.

Many people, of course, are deeply concerned about what is happening to water. Protest is loud and frequent, but in the absence of DOC there is only one organisation – Fish and Game – that has the determination and resources to do anything effective about it. Trout-anglers are conservationists – they have to be, or their sport would vanish. One hundred thousand of them buy licences every year, and it is they, not

DOC, who are battling for the rivers that belong to us all.

Few among the media or general public understand this paradoxical situation, but if the destruction of our rivers is ever to be stopped – if they are ever to be swimmable again – it will largely depend on the presence of trout, not galaxids.

George Orwell understood this kind of thing, which he lampooned in his novel: “Animal Farm”. Divide the world into good and bad, make distinctions, valid or not, and it is very easy to demonise anything you care to pick upon. And the current popular mantra that “native is good and exotic is bad” fits the Orwell thesis exactly. There is the same stubborn rejection of the world as it is, and the same fixation on some mythical future when all will be restored to an imagined state of perfection. The DOC spokeswoman with her delusions about trout was merely affirming her Department’s current doctrine – and she can get away with it because the unfortunate fact is that the average citizen doesn’t know a galaxid from a galaxy – unless he or she happens to be a whitebaiter. Knowledge of nature is rare these days, so nonsense like this is widely accepted, and by the industrious promotion of similar fables a whole expanding empire of pure bullshit is foisted upon the public.

DOC, as a government department, has no true independence. The pursuit of economic growth is now endorsed by every administration and political party. But more growth means less nature, however you try to disguise it, and until this unwelcome truth is recognised the task of conservation must be confrontational, uncertain, and beset with inevitable risks to the employees of government departments.

When reality becomes too difficult we are apt to take refuge in fantasy. Why engage in interminable battles? Why hazard one’s job, promotion, and peace of mind, when, by a subtle sideways shift of ground one might escape the dilemma altogether? The temptation is almost irresistible, and DOC, in its embrace of mass poisoning – its huge and delusional “Battle for the Birds” – has yielded. One day, the Department’s experts assure us, the forests will be restored to abundant life. A great deluge of poison will float from the sky and cleanse the land, and the dawn chorus will be heard anew.

Books could be written about this (and have been), so I shall not go over the propaganda, lies, fake science, more lies, blind faith, cowardice, and love of easy money that underpin the biggest environmental disaster in New Zealand’s modern history. The 1080 campaign is an abrogation of biological sanity. It is based on assumptions of omniscience and a tsunami of wishful thinking. It assumes that a deadly toxin – capable of killing everything – can be safely sprayed over an entire country, and it ignores all evidence except for convenient aberrations.

One might have thought that the DOC’s commitment to the Battle for the Birds was as far as self-deception could go. That even a compliant bureaucracy could retreat from rationality no further. One might have hoped, even, that a long-established government department could not entirely go off the rails. But dementia seems to breed further dementia, in a synergistic and ever-steepening death dive from which there is no hope of recovery.

The Battle for the Birds – always no more than a money-fueled smokescreen for impotence – is failing. Keas are dying mysteriously. Rock-wrens are disappearing, along with fernbirds, robins, and other native species. Even the penguins are carking in somewhat puzzling numbers, and the wider ecological impacts remain completely unknown.

Would a rethink on this suicidal strategy, then, possibly be in order? But no, not at all. The Department, now gambling on miracles, has decided to go for broke. There will be no retreat. There will, instead, be an escalation, a titanic advance, an eyes-tight messianic leap into the most stupendous fantasy of all: Predator-Free New Zealand!

It is the first of January, 2055. A fine and typically muggy morning in mid-century Aotearoa. The temperature is hovering on 34, and may reach 40 by noontime, unless the monsoon breaks. But never mind, the bananas are ripening nicely, and down by the shore, beyond the broad acres of multinational sugar-cane, the last eroding tower-blocks of old Tauranga stand stark among the shrimp-farms. A wind-turbine whispers above the sewage-ponds, and from a grove of coconut palms across the road waft the melodious notes of a reconstituted Huia. There is a disturbance in the languid air, a harsh cry, and a mighty Haast’s Eagle sweeps down the beach, a hogget grasped in her talons.

It is an idyllic scene. Far above, invisible, the tropical Frigate Birds orbit, and from her sanctuary beneath the swaying leaves an ancient DOC scientist reflects upon her achievements. The last rat was poisoned a decade ago, and the last stoat shortly after. The trout are gone. The possums are gone, and even the mice, down to the very last one. The cats in the end were easy, and it was truly touching to see the owners of two million pussies so patriotically deliver them to the abattoir. Dry eyes, that day, were few.

The future is an unknown country. New Zealand will be a very different place thirty years from now, but not as DOC imagines. There will be more people and less nature. There will be new plagues and pests, and our ability to contain them is as improbable as our competence to recreate a New Zealand now gone forever. Few predictions may be reliably made, but of one thing we may be certain: there will never be a predator-free New Zealand.

DOC’s own record is proof of this. 1080 has been going since 1954, and other poisons for much longer. But the possums and stoats are still doing well, along with the rest of the gang. Rats, it pays to remember, are the most successful mammals on Earth. They live happily on ships, so you can never permanently get rid of them. DOC knows this, or ought to,

from its own experiences on three remote islands in Fiordland. The last rat is captured every now and again – until another rat swims ashore.

It is marginally possible, with permanent effort and expense, to keep small islands predator-free. They can be sustained as sanctuaries if their re-infestation by rats and stoats is controlled ad infinitum. But what can be made to work on a small island is entirely impossible on a landmass the size of New Zealand, with its vast and varied environments and numerous cities and towns inhabited by the full range of mammalian predators.

The extermination campaign will never work, but it has several immediate advantages, not only for DOC, but for the politicians as well. DOC has devoted years of effort to promoting the mythic superiority of indigenous plants and animals, and this campaign has been remarkably successful. All it takes, as Dr. Goebbels knew, is to keep repeating the message. Galaxids are good and trout are evil. The Grey duck is a noble thing: the Mallard is a bastard. And once you have the innocent citizenry fully-primed it is time to wheel out the helicopters, the indoctrinated staff, the truckloads of 1080.

If the goal of bureaucracy is to pass the buck, DOC is a brilliant example. The public has been successfully mislead, topped up with happy fictions, and, most cunning of all, the pay-off date is safely in the distant future. Nobody in DOC will still be in DOC by 2050. And nobody in the government will still be in government. It is, as DOC’s lawyers like to say, a win-win situation.

Meanwhile, out in the forest, the Keas will keep on dying, along with millions of other creatures, great and small: mammals, reptiles, and tiny invertebrates. Thus we blunder, poisoning the earth, puffed up in our puny arrogance. It is infinitely sad and endlessly stupid.

Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad.”

Dave Witherow. 2017.

The questions raised here are not new, and they are unlikely to be resolved quickly. Predator control, biodiversity protection, and recreational access all intersect in ways that are not easily simplified. The challenge is whether current strategies are delivering measurable outcomes, and whether alternative approaches are being given fair consideration.