DAMAGE IN UPLANDS

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 103, 28 October 1933, Page 5

DAMAGE IN UPLANDS

PLANT-EATING PESTS

LOWLAND DANGERS

The New Zealand Institute of Horticulture and the New Zealand Forestry League"are in agreement as to the need of guarding against tho results of deforestation—results devastating to the lower valley lands and plains—if planteating animals are allowed to continue to attack the protection forests and the plant cover of the sub-alpine and alpine regions. They agree that the Government should act. The Forestry League urges the Government to probe the facts and elaborate remedies by means of a Boyal Commission. While not quite sure that a Eoyal Commission is the best means to the desired end, the New Zealand Institute of Horticulture "desires to range itself with the league in impressing upon the Government with all possible force the transcendent importance and extreme urgency of bringing every available Tesource to bear upon the solution of the problem created by this gigantic menace to the well-being of the Dominion as a whole." In a letter to the above effect, addressed to the Hon. E. A. Eansom, Commissioner of State Forests, the institute says it is very deeply impressed with tho extreme importance to the whole Dominion of preserving not only its remaining protection-forests, but also the plant-cover of its alpino regions, and has little or no doubt that introduced browsing, grazing, or rooting animals such, as deer, goats, pigs, thar, or chamois are doing incalculable and probably irreparable damage to the forest and other plant-cover of our mountain regions. The institute feels that, if this damage is allowed to continue results disastrous to the occupiers of the farms and towns along the courses of the rivers emanating from these regions must continue to accrue, and must greatly increase in severity as time goes on. The institute believes that the problem presented by the presence of these animals in numbers in the high, country is already much too great to be coped with by any authority other than the General Government.