CRITICAL VIEW

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 60, Issue 210, 13 June 1940, Page 3

CRITICAL VIEW

ACCLIMATISATION SOCIETIES. “CURSE OF NEW ZEALAND” (Special to the “ Guardian.”) CHRISTCHURCH, This Day. “Acclimisation societies are the curse of New Zealand, “ said Mr L. "W. McCaskill, of the Christchurch Teachers' Training College, in an address on conservation to the Canterbury School Committees’ Association last evening. “The acclimatisation societies are only sectionally interested in the wild life of the country,” he said. “They are not concerned with fundamental issues at all. If you want to have a vote on one of their councils you have to be a shooter or a man with a licence to fish. That is all that interests them. “The control of the wild life of the country should not be in the hands of people who are sectionally interested. Because they shoot the grey duck they have no more right to the duck than I, who am interested to observe it and take children to see and be interested in it.

“These birds belong, like all the other birds of our country, to the whole of the people. A sectional body like the acclimatisation society does not represent the whole of the people, and has not the right to control of wild life. When we have a Minister of the Crown genuinely wanting to perpetuate the wild life of the country and to have a full survey of it, so that it may bo conserved, yet leaving room for the shooters, then we find a howl going «P- . . “ Yet the acclimatisation societies have been responsible for the destruction of much of our valuable and most rare bird life. For instance, # hy having p price on the heads of birds such as black shags, they have cultivated a destructive habit among the people. Men with guns will shoot anything to see what it is and perhaps get a price for its head.”

Mr McCaskill appealed to school committee members to see that children were- taught to study and protect bird life. ,