Importing stoats and weasels popular at the time
OPINION
Rabbits were first released in New Zealand in the 1850s. Almost overnight they became a scourge as they overran sheep stations, ate pasture and drove farmers off their land, especially in Otago and South Canterbury.
Sheep farmers wanting to protect their properties and the Colonial Government wanting to protect its wool export profits thought to import the British rabbit’s traditional enemies – stoats and weasels.
These animals seemed ideal for the job. In fact, ferrets had been here for some time but they had done little to cut the number of rabbits, so, under the Rabbit Nuisance Act of 1881 and the Rabbit Control Legislation of 1892, farmers and others imported shiploads of stoats, ferrets and weasels.
Recently, in the New Zealand Journal of Ecology, Dr Carolyn King of Waikato University – who has spent most of her life chasing stoats round the bush – reports on 15 boatloads of stoats and weasels landed here in the 1880s and early 1890s.
The Victorians went about the job with enthusiasm. These 15 ships unloaded 963 stoats and 2622 weasels between 1884 and 1892. One ship landed 137 stoats at Marlborough and another landed 428 weasels in Wairarapa.
Wairarapa run-holder Edward Riddiford imported an anti-rabbit shipment to Wellington in July 1885. Two men rode to Martinborough with 69 boxes of stoats and weasels and then released. The shipment cost Riddiford more than £800 to collect the animals in England and land them here. Nevertheless. Riddiford imported a second batch later in the same year.
Many animals died on these long voyages. A Kaikoura farmer paid to have 600 stoats and weasels sent from England, but every one died en route. Of another 200 animals sent later, only two ferrets and two stoats survived.
Government records show that by 1920, 18,333 ferrets, stoats and weasels were imported into New Zealand and had spread to every corner of the country.
Not content with importing these animals, enterprising farmers in Marlborough bred them for sale. In 1889, they sold 1000 stoats, 1000 weasels, 1000 ferrets, and 400 cats, mainly to Otago farmers. The following year they sold more than 7000 ferrets in Otago.
Laws of the day protected rabbit predators. Anyone could be fined up to £10 for killing a ferret, stoat, weasel or cat.
By the turn of the century, attitudes to these animals were changing. Poultry farmers got angry about their big losses, as did gamebird shooters. Until the arrival of stoats and weasels, pheasants and quail could be shot in huge numbers but, with the spread of mustelids, shooting tallies dropped precipitously. The discerning public also became aware of stoats and weasels decimating native bird populations on farms and in the bush.
Proto-conservationist Sir Walter Buller repeatedly criticised introductions writing, ‘‘A crime. The vermin that every farmer in the Old Country was trying to extirpate as an unmitigated devil, our Government imported into this country in the vain hope that they would change their habits.’’