Thread: West Coast poison drop & no mention of repellant

Originally Posted by Sauer

To be honest Tahr, I would be surprised if the cost of production of 1080 was a significant portion of the overall cost of the operation when you’re talking about many hours of helicopter operation.

In 2019 at Abbey Rocks they apparently laid 2kg of cereal pellets per hectare, and the pellets had 1.5 grams of 1080 per kg of pellets - so 3 grams of 1080 per hectare which is less than a teaspoon per hectare.

Sodium mono-fluoroacetate is not a complex chemical by any means. If you knew what you were doing you could make it in your kitchen. The main cost of producing it commercially will be in complying with red tape requirements.

Cereal pellets are also cheap to produce. You can buy a 20 kg bag of layer pellets for around $33 retail.

Yes, cost of consent and the inevitable legal challenges used to far outweigh the combined cost of the application and the bait back 20 years ago.
I doubt anything has changed.

Originally Posted by Tahr

2 things.
Repellent use seems to be tied to lobbying. Its expensive, but if its lobbied for it will more likely be used. The Tararua, Rimutaka and Haurangi operations over the next couple of years are all with repellent.
And this is an OSPRI/TB operation. Deer will be a by-kill, but not the target species. In any event, 1080 is not registered for use on deer so will not be used anywhere as a targeted/primary poison on them (thats not to say that in their operations DOC aren't quietly pleased when there is a deer by-kill).

You say this but the last time they poisoned the hihitahi bush up our way they were targeting possums and I walked in to zekes hut in the night a 2 hour walk with head torch and I only saw one possum. And then the deerstalkers had ospri come and talk to us in one of the deerstalkers meetings and we gave him the question about why they 1080d it and how many possums did they actually find for reason of poisoning and he was very good at dodging the question .

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Their classic tactic is to say they know from experience that their poisoning will have been a success and therefore no or minimal monitoring required. Classic example of self perpetuating beauracracy. Several regional councils issue 10 year resource consents. The pre poison drop applications which are supposed to fully identify effects on non target species including native birds and invertebrates have become unquestioned standardised box ticking farcical paper shuffling. However, unlike the old Animal Health Board; now OSPRI and DoC are subject to OIA information requests as well as scrutiny by Ombudsman and even SFO and Audit. Concerned persons need to formulate very specific carefully constructed series of single vsry specific questions and backed by reasonable evidence to activate the investigation processes and be warned; such process is very hard work and fraught with obfuscations in the OIA stages -- and often thankless.