Days of future past

For the lay person reflecting on New Zealand’s past, especially the ‘‘townie’’, some stories would seem to come straight out of the mythical wild west.

A tale from just under a century ago falls into this category.

In March of 1921, a farm hand of Ngaroma, Thomas Frederick Archer, was charged with ‘‘destroying the car of a skin taken from a carcase of a beast killed on Crown land’’.

Archer’s crime, which he freely admitted, was shooting a cow that had strayed on to public land.

Afterwards he had cut the ears off the beast.

Fancifully, he claimed he did this ‘‘to see whether they bled or not’’, as a kind of experiment.

The fact that the possessive branding of the cow was likely to be found on the ears had nothing to do with it.

The prosecution case sounded like something out of Robin Hood, citing mediaeval notions of poaching.

The shooting was believed an offence as all cattle on public land ‘‘were deemed to be property of the Crown’’.

Archer had shot a cow that was literally thought to ‘‘belong to the King’’. George V’s views on the matter were not recorded.

Archer’s attorney argued that it was standard rural practice ‘‘to shoot wild cattle for meat’’.

Archer had done no more or no less than any other farmer in the region would.

The magistrate would have none of it. Archer was convicted.

A few days later an opinion piece in the Waikato Times took up the case.

Fearing the ruling would set a precedent, rendering the shooting of wild pigs and wild horses illegal as well, the correspondent lamented ‘‘the lot of the outback settler’’ whose life is ‘‘rendered all the more drab and dreary by the prohibition of the chief of the very few joys incidental to his somewhat monotonous life’’.

With tongue firmly in cheek, the writer also addressed a logical corollary of the contention that stray cattle were Crown cattle.

If they were deemed thus – and if farmers were denied the right to shoot them – any damage done by strays could be charged against the state.