Auckland Island pigs face doom

Plans are under way to wipe out 1000 pigs on the subantarctic Auckland Islands, at a cost of millions of dollars.

However, if the pigs are still needed for medical research in New Zealand, the Department of Conservation says it will help get some of the animals off the island and to the mainland.

DOC southern South Island boss Allan Munn said all the Auckland Island pigs were concentrated on the 50,000-hectare Auckland Island, the main island of several in the Auckland Islands group, 465km south of Bluff.

Pigs were initially introduced to the islands by sealers and whalers as a food source for the men doing the work. However, the pigs’ voracious eating habits had done damage to the plants and mammals on the island, so would be hunted till they were gone.

‘‘They are carnivores opportunists,’’ Munn said.

‘‘They eat all the plants that are palatable and roots of those plants and take every opportunity to eat penguins and sea lions, and they can get albatross.’’

DOC has begun planning for the eradication of the pigs and Munn expected the hunting to begin in about 14 months. Infrastructure would need to be put in place to accommodate the hunters.

Munn believed it would cost about $2m each year they were killing the pigs but he was unsure how long it would take to complete the mission.

‘‘If everything went really well, maybe two years, maybe four.’’ and

The pig eradication would rely mainly on hunting and trapping, he said.

Dogs would be the ‘‘ace tool’’ in the fight to eradicate the pigs, but would only be used by hunters to clean up the last of the pigs so the porkers did not ‘‘wise up’’ to the dogs.

The Auckland Islands had harsh winters, which would play into the hunters’ hands because the pigs spent lots of time on the beaches eating seaweed during winter.

Munn said a team of hunters would be chosen, including some known by DOC to do the business in past hunting ventures.

‘‘Because of the cost of the project, we are looking for the All Blacks of the pig hunting world.’’

Biotechnology company Living Cell Technologies, which has used the Auckland Island pigs in its bid to find a cure for diabetes, had expressed an interest in getting some live pigs back to the mainland, Munn said.

’’We have been working with ... groups, including Living Cell Technologies, and we are sympathetic to making sure anyone who wants the pigs live; we will try to accommodate that.’’

They could be caught and taken back to the South Island in a crate on the HMNZS Otago warship, he said.

Living Cell Technologies had set up a quarantine area for some of the pigs it already had in Southland while it was doing trials, but the pigs were later rehomed after the trials stopped.

DOC has a mission to make all the subantarctic islands predator free by 2025.