STOATS AND WEASELS

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1593, 8 January 1925, Page 5

STOATS AND WEASELS

DO 'NOT EXTERMINATE RABBITS

Quite a number of practical • fanners have in recent months written to the newspapers in various parts of the Dominion on the subject of rabbit control or extermination, and several have given their views on the contention that stoats and weasels are the most effective destroyers of the übiquitous rabbit . A Turakina farmer, who prefers to figure under a nom de plume, writes as under: "I was rather amused at the remarks of Mr Coleman Phillips re stoats and weasels appearing in one of your issues last month. How different, indeed, is theory to practice. I suppose no one has had more experience than myself with rabbits and stoats and weasels. I have been farming in the rabbit infested area in Himatangi and up the west coast of this island, which is the worst place in New Zealand for rabbits, from its sandy nature Tf the farmer depended on these pests for the destruction of the rabbit, he would come very badly off. There are plenty of weasels and stoats and ferrets about there, but it makes no difference, as I could see, and the farmers of those parts are of the same opinion. In fact, I believe they all live in the same burrows. The only thing these pests have wiped out in those parts is the harmless old woodhen, which is now extinct on this coast. For rats and mice there is nothing like the cat, and I believe they destroy the most rabbits. I was rather amused at a notice put up in the post office here, "Protect your native birds," and underneath some wag wrote,-"and import more stoats and weasels." My own opinion is that they are the greatest pest ever 'imported into this country, in spite of what Mr Phillips says. Of course, if a man gets up in the morning and finds his fowl pen wiped out by these brutes he has to, think they do more good than harm. I can assure Mr Phillips that they get short shift in this district, and the sooner the country is rid of them the better.