RABBIT PEST

Feilding Star, Volume XVIII, Issue 4592, 18 May 1922, Page 3

RABBIT PEST

SECOND EDITION

/ Star Office, 2.30 p.m

CONTROVERSY OVER CURE. COLEMAN PHILLIPS UNDER EIRE. (By Electric Cable— Copyright.) (Aust. and, N.Z. Cable. Association. (Received May 18, noon.) Sydney, May 18. Contention is raging in tlio newspapers around the advice given by Mr Coleman Phillips, a visiting Now Zealander (ho is a Wairarapa taimer, and a Grey town lawyer) , at a pastoralists’ meeting that stoats and weasels should bo introduced to combat the rabbit plague. The meeting resolved to ask the Federal Government to permit their introduction. Mr Symons, Chief Inspector of Stock for N.S.AV., declares that a similar proposal bad been considered from time to time by both the "’ederal and State Governments. He says Mr Phillips’ proposals are largely regarded as theories. Some years ego official enquiries were made in New Zealand, and the information obtained was utterly opposed to the proposal, for the reason that the introduced stoats and weasels had quite forsaken the pursuit of rabbits and had become serious and destructive pests to poultrv and all kinds of bird life. Later official reports from New Zealand all indicated that the only effective methods of dealing with the rabbit were netting, poisoning, and trapping. Mr Froggart, Vice-President of the Zoological Society, also issues a stror g warning against the danger of ml reducing the Phillips methods.