Zinc Phosphide Bait Used To Kill Jerboa

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30368, 18 February 1964, Page 17

Zinc Phosphide Bait Used To Kill Jerboa

Research workers at the Central Arid Zone Research Institute, Jodhpur, India, have worked out bait doses of zinc phosphide which, while being large enough to kill jerboa (a rodent pest of pasture land), are yet small enough not to be a danger to sheep which might eat the baits, or to human beings who might eat predators which had devoured the jerboa. Dr. I. Prakash, a senior animal ecologist at the institute, who is visiting Australia and New Zealand to observe methods of rabbit and hare control, described the method in an interview.

Asked whether zinc phosphide might be useful against pests in New Zealand. Dr. Prakash said he expected this poison had been tried, but did not know with what results.

The jerboa was a burrowing animal which competes with sheep much as the rabbit did, Ek-. Prakash said. It commonly reached a density of 500 to the acre, even in near-desert conditions. Its

burrows stretched “for miles and miles together,” in every direction. Where its burrows were the soil was so loose that it could not even be walked on. Dr. Prakash is attached as a U.N.E.S.CO. research fellow to tire Division of Wildlife Research in Canberra, and is on a three weeks’ visit to New Zealand at the invitation of the Animal Ecology Division of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. In Christchurch he has made contact with the Botany Division of the department, the Tussock Grasslands and Mountain Levels Institute, and the zoology department of the University of Canterbury.