[barrydahlberg]

I live in New Zealand and spend some time in our back country deer stalking, trout fishing and exploring.

NZ uses about 80% of the worlds supply of 1080 poison[1] and our next trip is into one of the areas where it is dropped every few years. 1080 is a horrible thing and I hate what we do with it. It kills animals it wasn't meant for, it makes game unsafe to eat and it's not a pleasant way to go. However I love NZ because of what nature has given us here, and unfortunately the poison is currently the best tool we have to protect the birds that we have left. Trapping and hunting are useful tools but we have so much remote, inaccessible wilderness that it is not feasible on its own.

I would love to see more innovation in tools to control the rats, the possums, the stoats and other small mammals that NZ grew up without and doesn't know how to handle. I'm hoping that new technology coming from start ups like we have here will bring new ideas and techniques. A major challenge will be taking those ideas and adapting them to work reliably in remote and harsh conditions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1080_usage_in_New_Zealand

[mapt]

It makes a hell of a lot of sense to use these things in a credible, short-term 100% extermination drive, supplemented by other methods including hunting. We've extirpated animals like this before, like the wolves of North America.

But... it's a mammalian toxin. Humans are mammals. I don't understand why you would want to reintroduce it into your home every year as some kind of maintenance activity.

[leohutson]

The bait drops are restricted to within park boundaries. Within those bounds there should be no mammals, save for humans who know better than to eat bait pellets, and perhaps the occasional muzzled dog ( with a permit ). There is a by-kill of native animals, but that pales in comparison to the amount that would be killed by unchecked predator growth. No human has been killed or harmed by DOC 1080 drops.

http://www.forestandbird.org.nz/saving-our-environment/nativ...

The main opponents to 1080 are hunters, nimbies and people that believe in chem-trails and threaten to poison milk formula.

Hunters I can empathize with to some degree, but in the end, they have a vested interest in preserving the populations of feral animals, not in the elimination of them.

[barrydahlberg]

Basically accurate here but "hunters" does cover a pretty diverse group of people with many different motivations. They include many who care very deeply about conservation and unfortunately also those who threaten to poison milk formula. I don't think you'll find many on either side that have any love for rats.

As said above, 1080 is the best choice we have but we should (and do) keep looking for better alternatives. It would be nice if we didn't have to greet visitors to our national parks with this all the time:

http://www.tongarirorivermotel.co.nz/wp-content/gallery/misc...

[barrydahlberg]

Note we have some offshore islands etc where 100% kill has been achieved. We're not even close to being able to achieve that on the mainland though.

[mapt]

And that's what seems pointless.

If you can't achieve a 100% kill rate over some area, and progressively expand that area, what's the goal of working against it at all? A pest invasion isn't going to get dispirited and retreat when it takes 30% losses, like a foreign military might, it's going to heal its population losses and go right back to being limited by other factors in a matter of weeks or months.

I spent a term paper five years back pondering our response to bark beetles before concluding that the entire campaign to 'control' the infestation was basically a means of permitting the logging industry to log areas that we would not otherwise want logged, financed with political capital from the environmentalist movement. I see that other people are catching on to this narrative as well:

http://grist.org/science/bark-beetles-are-killing-forests-bu...

[barrydahlberg]

The hope is to hold the pests back to a level at which the native species can survive.

[danmaz74]

Wolves are big. Rats are small. It's a fundamental difference when you think about exterminating some animal.

[saurik]

"The Big Kill: New Zealand's Crusade to Rid Itself of Mammals"

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/22/big-kill