The chronology of a sad historical misjudgement: The introductions of rabbits and ferrets in nineteenth-century New Zealand

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THE CHRONOLOGY OF A SAD
HISTORICAL MISJUDGEMENT:
THE INTRODUCTIONS OF RABBITS
AND FERRETS IN NINETEENTH‑
CENTURY NEW ZEALAND
CAROLYN M. KING
Environmental Research Institute, School of Science,
University of Waikato
Abstract
During the second half of the nineteenth century, rabbit damage to pastoral runs was
threatening to bring about a serious economic crisis in the southern South Island of
New Zealand. The obvious solution was to import thousands of the rabbits’ ‘natural
enemies’—starting with ferrets—in the hope they would keep the rabbits under control.
This article reviews the arguments surrounding this decision, and describes the persons
most actively involved, their reasoning and their actions, compiled from contemporary
documents and reports, many unpublished. The introduction of ferrets proceeded
despite repeated local and international warnings, but ferrets could not remove
enough rabbits to prevent the continuing damage to sheep pastures. Contemporary
ecologists often wonder why such reckless decisions were made, but this new
analysis of the historic details illustrates how well‑meant and apparently reasonable
environmental management actions can precipitate a cascade of unintended and
undesirable consequences.
Keywords: pastoralism, colonial government, environmental history, rabbit pest,
ferret, New Zealand
Introduction
e history of the arrival and impact of rabbits in New Zealand has become one
of the best-known examples of well-intentioned acclimatisation gone wrong.1
Enterprising settlers rst released wild rabbits in the reasonable hope of establishing
a source of fresh meat and shooting sport, but without any way to anticipate the
1 J. A. Gibb and J. M. Williams, ‘e rabbit in New Zealand’, in e European Rabbit: the History and Biology
of a Successful Colonizer, ed. H. V. ompson and C. M. King (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 158–204.

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140
unexpected results. e previous experience of the colonists gave them no hint that
rabbit populations might behave dierently in New Zealand from the way they did
in Britain at the time. ey were surprised to see that, from the early to mid-1870s,
burrowing and pasture damage by rabbits was beginning to cause serious reductions
in sheep numbers, wool clip and lambing percentages associated with malnutrition
of the breeding ewes. e consequent decline in the value of pastoral land set back
by decades the development of pastoralism, the dominant source of income of the
young colony.2
Apparently rational decisions made by those who attempted to control the rabbit
plague by introducing ‘the rabbits’ natural enemies’ simply compounded the
problem, but for dierent, less forgivable reasons. ey did not act in ignorance,
but against vehement and well-informed objections that predicted all too accurately
the risk of irreversible damage to New Zealand’s endemic fauna.3 Until now, there
has never been a comprehensive review of the origins and numbers of the ferrets
imported, or the methods by which they were collected and transported, and many
existing accounts are inaccurate or incomplete. By contrast, historical documents
preserve, in often startling detail, the way that crucial decisions were made during
this unfolding crisis.
e rabbit invasion that began in the late 1860s badly shook the newly developed
pastoral agriculture establishment and its associated clients. e Colonial Oce and
successive ministers considered the problem only in terms of how to save the wool
industry by nding more and better ways to kill rabbits, especially if that could be
done free of charge by natural enemies. ey reasoned that the balance of nature
had been articially disturbed, so some compensation would be needed. Colonial
ocials had no way to understand why natural enemies could not attain the eect
required over the long term and at the landscape scale required.4 Semi-domestic
ferrets, known and ecient rabbit-killers, easy to handle and breed, and already
present in Australia, were the most obvious natural enemy of the rabbit to try rst.
2 S. Hodgkinson, ‘Report of the Rabbit Nuisance Committee’, Appendix to the Journals of the House
of Representatives [henceforth AJHR] I–5 (Wellington: George Didsbury, Government Printer, 1876); J. L. C.
Richardson and W. H. Pearson, ‘e Rabbit Nuisance in Southland’, AJHR H–10 (1876); P. Holland and
G. Figgins, ‘Environmental disturbance triggering infestations of gorse, rabbits and thistles in southern New
Zealand: 1850 to 1980’, International Review of Environmental History 1 (2015): 41–79.
3 W. L. Buller, ‘On the proposed introduction of the polecat into New Zealand’, Transactions & Proceedings
ofthe New Zealand Institute 9 (1877): 634–5.
4 G. Norbury, ‘Mythbusters: can predators control rabbits in New Zealand?’, Kararehe Kino 18 (2011): 22;
G. Norbury and B. Reddiex, ‘European rabbit’, in Handbook of New Zealand mammals, 2nd ed., ed. C. M. King
(Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2005), 131–50.

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141
The location and size of the problem
Rabbits prefer a dry climate and soft, sandy soils that are easy to burrow in. Hence
the ‘rabbit problem’ in New Zealand was largely conned to the grassy, low-rainfall
eastern areas on both main islands, mapped by Peter Holland and Guil Figgins
(Figure 1). ese were the areas rst settled by pastoralists from the 1850s onwards,
who grazed large ocks of sheep on runs (blocks of Crown-owned grassland) leased
from the government under licence.
Figure 1: Locations of places mentioned in the text. Dark lines enclose the extent of
open country, as defined by Holland and Figgins,5 that is, the main area covered by
pastoral runs and the favoured habitat for rabbits. For names, numbers and further
descriptions of runs in Otago and Southland, see Pinney6 and Sinclair.7
Source: The author. Cartography: Max Oulton.
5 Holland and Figgins, ‘Environmental disturbance triggering infestations’, 41–79.
6 R. Pinney, Early Northern Otago Runs (Auckland: Collins, 1981).
7 J. G. Sinclair, ‘e Early Pastoral Runs of Otago and Southland’, (Dunedin: Hocken Library, 2003).

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By 1882, more than 1,000 runs were established, of which all but 26 were in the
South Island.8 ree-quarters of the 1.3 million acres (526,091 ha) of pastoral
landoccupied in 1882, and two-thirds of the runs, lay in Otago and Canterbury.
ese two provinces also supplied more than half of the national wool clip
for export. Hence the runholders in those areas, especially those in Otago, had
a disproportionately large inuence on the colonial secretary’s policy concerning
rabbits. Many of them were members of the Squatters’ Club in Dunedin, the local
equivalent of the best gentlemen’s clubs in London, with the same connections with
the levers of power.9
In the South Island, there were two separate centres of rabbit invasion at opposite
ends of the island: Marlborough–Kaikoura in the north, and Southland–Otago in
the south. In Southland and Otago, rabbit damage was already becoming locally
severe by 1875. Most of Canterbury was still free of rabbits in late 1883, but the
Canterbury runholders feared invasion from both directions.10 In the North Island,
the rst populations of rabbits to reach very large numbers were conned to the
Wairarapa and Hawkes Bay.
In 1883, runholder Charles de Vere Teschemaker attempted to account for the full
scale of the damage done to the economy of the colony by rabbits. e logic of his
estimate is worth considering in full:
e public pastoral estate of Otago and Southland alone consists of some 8,000,000
acres [3,237,485 ha]. In 1873, this land was worth from 5s to 40s an acre, say an
average of 15s, and would have been readily purchased at that price. Total value,
£6,000,000. Today [29 September 1883], solely on account of the rabbit, the public
estate of Otago and Southland has depreciated fully 50 per cent … our loss …
sofar as the capital value of the country is concerned, up to the present amounts to
£3,000,000; [plus] an annual loss [of income from reductions in lambing percentages
and wool clip] of £1,700,000.11
roughout the 1880s, the need to nd a solution to the rabbit problem became
ever more pressing. e Oamaru Mail reported the rabbit pest was ‘developing
intoa diculty quite as large and stubborn as any with which the colony is called
upon to deal. Nobody seems to really know how to face it’. e newspaper cited
areport by the Commissioner for Crown Lands in Canterbury, who found that the
rabbits swarming just south of the border with Otago were eating the country bare,
8 Registrar-General’s Oce, Statistics of the Colony of New Zealand for the years 1870 to 1899 [Blue Books]
(Wellington: Government Printer, 1870–99).
9 F. R. J. Sinclair, ‘High Street Quaking: A history of Dunedin’s “Inner Circle”’ (PhD diss., University of Otago,
1996).
10 R. M. Burdon, High Country: e evolution of a New Zealand sheep farm (Auckland: Whitcombe and Tombs,
1938).
11 C. de V. Teschemaker, ‘e Rabbit Nuisance’, (Nelson: [s.n.], 1883). A copy is held in the Sir George Grey
Special Collections, Auckland Central City Library, at 636.9 T33.

The chronology of a sad historical misjudgement
143
and were now ‘menacing Canterbury … but whether poison, or ferrets, stoats, and
weasles, or men and dogs, or all of them, should be employed is a matter on which
experts only are capable of judging’.12
Natural enemies of the rabbit
Ferrets are semi-domesticated animals with a long history of articial breeding,
which made them easy to tame and handle, either as a pet or as a trained working
companion for a rabbit-catcher, but unused to living independently of human
care. e use and management of ferrets to control and harvest rabbits was a well-
established rural skill, widely practised in Britain13 and easily imported into New
Zealand with experienced immigrants. e ferrets themselves were bad travellers, but
local ferret-breeding stud farms could be easily established to supply the accelerating
demand from New Zealand landholders. Over at least 50 years after 1870, tens
ofthousands of ferrets were bred and released on rabbit-damaged pastoral lands.
Ferrets are specialist predators of small to mid-sized rodents and rabbits. eir long,
thin bodies and short legs give them a smooth tubular shape that allows them to move
easily through rabbit burrows. ey have sharp, triangular faces, small, rounded ears
folded back against the head, and a short, excitable tail. Feral ferrets, domesticated
animals that have escaped human control, are still generally less aggressive than the
larger, wild carnivores with which they have to compete, so their largest populations
in Britain are found on islands.14
e idea of employing ferrets to kill rabbits was not a new one. e Greek author
Strabo (64/63 BC – 24 AD) describes how ferrets were specially bred for that
purpose, and muzzled before being sent into rabbit burrows.15 e rabbits were
driven out into the open, where they were caught by men stationed at the holes
with clubs or nets. When the idea of rabbiting with ferrets became known during
the middle ages, the practice became widespread in Europe. Rabbits and ferrets
both arrived in England, possibly together, sometime between the eleventh and
fourteenth centuries.
12 Oamaru Mail, 30 June 1887, 2.
13 J. Marchington, Pugs and Drummers: Ferrets and Rabbits in Britain (London: Faber and Faber, 1978).
14 T. W. Bodey, S. Bearhop, and R. A. McDonald, ‘e diet of an invasive nonnative predator, the feral ferret
Mustela furo, and implications for the conservation of ground-nesting birds’, European Journal of Wildlife Research
57, no. 1 (2011): 107–17, doi.org/10.1007/s10344-010-0404-y.
15 A. P. D. omson, ‘A history of the ferret’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 6 (1951):
471–80, doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/VI.Autumn.471.

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e introduction of invertebrate natural enemies is a standard technique for the
management of insect pests, and can sometimes be spectacularly successful.16
Butattempts to employ vertebrate predators to manage vertebrate pests seldom
work so well, or at all, except under special conditions, and most turn out to
have disastrous side eects. e story of mustelids in New Zealand is not only
an interesting illustration of this generalisation, but also illustrates the interplay
ofsocial and biological factors in colonisation.
e aim of this paper is to describe the historical and social context of this
unprecedented programme, to the extent that the original records still survive or
can be deduced. I have presented the arguments proposed by supporters from both
sides during the debates of the time.
Methods
Primary sources on the organisation of importations are preserved in New Zealand
archives and research libraries. ey comprise the documentary equivalent
of an archaeological dig, in which careful extraction and interpretation can
oer an incomplete but useful picture of the events and decisions of the time.
efollowingaccount is based on extensive searches of these records.
Ocial reports of the New Zealand Parliamentary debates, and the Appendices to the
Journals of the House of Representatives, are the most reliable and accessible sources,
mostly already digitised. Handwritten letters, farm diaries and unpublished analyses
are freely accessible but mostly not digitised, so are available only to readers on site.
e main repositories are Archives New Zealand, Statistics New Zealand, and the
Alexander Turnbull Library (all in Wellington); the Hocken Library (Dunedin); the
Auckland Institute and Museum; the city libraries of Auckland and Dunedin; and
the Maritime Museums of Auckland, Lyttelton, Port Chalmers, and Blu. Ihave
personally searched all of these except the Lyttelton Maritime Museum, which
was closed in 2011 due to earthquake damage. I also commissioned professional
archivists to search smaller New Zealand museums on my behalf. In England,
Isearched the National Archives at Kew, the Caird Library of the National Maritime
Museum, theBodleian Library, Oxford, and the Cambridge University Library.
By the mid-nineteenth century, there were dozens of provincial newspapers in New
Zealand, each a rich source of information about local events and people, often
reprinting signicant items from correspondents and news publications overseas.17
16 J. R. Beddington, C. A. Free, and J. H. Lawton, ‘Characteristics of successful natural enemies in models
ofbiological control of insect pests’, Nature 273 (1978): 513–19, doi.org/10.1038/273513a0.
17 E. Pawson and N. C. Quigley, ‘e circulation of information and frontier development: Canterbury
1850–1890’, New Zealand Geographer 38 (1982): 65–76, doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-7939.1982.tb00995.x.

The chronology of a sad historical misjudgement
145
Online newspaper databases oer easily accessible and valuable accounts of shipping
movements, and reports of meetings showing how people reacted to the rst
ferretarrivals.18
Financial records are cited in the currency used in New Zealand in the nineteenth
century, the British pound sterling (£), divided into 20 shillings (s), each of
12 pence (d). e Reserve Bank of New Zealand provides an online calculator
by which sterling amounts back to 1862 can be converted into contemporary
NewZealand dollars.19
Results
Rabbits in New Zealand
e European rabbit is a remarkably successful colonising species.20 Live rabbits
are easily carried in small hutches on ships, and in the days before refrigeration
they were a vital source of fresh meat for sailors on long voyages. Rabbits were
distributed on islands around the world to provide food for castaways, and from the
earliest days of the European diaspora, they accompanied pioneer farmers travelling
to colonise new territories overseas.21
e rst rabbits to arrive in New Zealand were probably brought by whalers to
the south coast of the South Island. ey were a normal article of trade at shore
stations,sowere shipped from Sydney during the two decades of the 1820s–1830s
alongwith other supplies.22 ere were reports of sightings of rabbits in southern
New Zealand in the 1840s and 1850s, although only in small numbers.23
As colonisation proceeded, rabbits were transported and liberated by settlers in
several other parts of New Zealand, for sport as well as for meat.24
One story, about the introduction of rabbits to Southland in 1863, describes the
occasion when four rabbits, brought to Blu on the immigrant ship Helenslea from
Scotland, were liberated in the sandhills near Invercargill:
18 Papers Past, National Library of New Zealand: paperspast.natlib.govt.nz; the British Newspaper Archive:
britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk.
19 rbnz.govt.nz/monetary-policy/ination-calculator.
20 H. V. ompson and C. M. King, eds., e European Rabbit: e History and Biology of a Successful Colonizer
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
21 T. R. Dunlap, Nature and the English diaspora: Environment and history in the United States, Canada, Australia
and New Zealand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
22 Gibb and Williams, ‘e rabbit in New Zealand’, 158–204.
23 F. G. Hall-Jones, Historical Southland (Invercargill: H. & J. Smith for Southland Historical Committee, 1945).
24 G. A. Hamilton, History of Northern Southland (Invercargill: Southland Times, 1952).

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ere was a liberation ceremony with speeches and toasts drunk in champagne.
But… an old Highlander named Mitchell … stood on a sandhill and cursed the
rabbits in Gaelic, saying they would ruin the country. No one paid much attention at
the time … but many of those present must have lived to see the day [when Mitchell
was proved right] … and remember his words.25
e rabbits that arrived in the Helenslea were not the rst brought to Southland, but
by the 1870s, they were widely believed to have been the origin of what became an
unstoppable horde of rabbits moving northwards into the hitherto highly protable
sheep runs of inland Southland and Otago. In the northern South Island, silver-
grey rabbits were released in 1858 and in 1862, and they too reached pest levels
in the early to mid-1870s. e historical geographer A. H. Clark cites Sir Alister
McIntosh’s 1940 history of Marlborough as estimating that more than a million
acres (404,685 ha) of sheep pasture in that province were damaged by rabbits in less
than 15 years.26
According to the rst ocial survey of what was called, with remarkable
understatement, ‘e Rabbit Nuisance’, wild rabbits rst appeared on the nely
grassed and valuable sheep country among the sandhills between Invercargill and
Riverton in about 1864.27 Concentrated grazing by rabbits turned what had been
arolling sward into barren, shifting sandhills. From there, rabbits spread inland
along the rivers, assisted by farmers, runholders and gold-diggers, who trapped and
carried with them a few rabbits to supplement their sometimes meagre diets.28
By 1875, reports from Crown lessees (who held large blocks of leasehold grazing
land for sheep runs) describing rapidly increasing pasture damage over the previous
two years in Southland began to alarm the Provincial Council. One man quoted
by the Otago Witness said that, from his own experience, ‘the plague of rabbits has
become so formidable, that it is now a struggle for existence between “fur v. wool”’.29
Official inquiries
In response to the concerns of Crown lessees in Southland, the Provincial Council
instituted a commission of inquiry to investigate the extent of the ‘rabbit nuisance’
in the district, and to consider means of dealing with it. e commission appointed
to investigate these reports doubted that such a sudden increase in rabbits could
have been possible in the short time frame reported, and suspected that the case
might be somewhat exaggerated.
25 Ibid., 34
26 A. H. Clark, e invasion of New Zealand by people, plants and animals: e South Island (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1949), citing A. D. McIntosh, ed., Marlborough: A Provincial History (Blenheim:
Marlborough Provincial History Committee, 1940).
27 Richardson and Pearson, ‘e Rabbit Nuisance in Southland’.
28 Hamilton, History of Northern Southland, 35.
29 Otago Witness, 9 December 1876, 21.

The chronology of a sad historical misjudgement
147
Members of the provincial commission travelled widely around the aected
districts, interviewing witnesses and consulting both those aected by it locally and
the relevant authorities in New South Wales and Tasmania. ey conrmed that the
rabbits had indeed spread to the whole of Southland ‘within the short period of two
years’. ey compiled gures documenting the reduction of the Southland wool clip
by 700–800 bales compared with the previous year, and losses of lambs averaging
up to 20 per cent across the province per season, both attributed to malnutrition
of ewes following rabbit damage to pastures. e commission listed the diculties
of exterminating rabbits caused by their extraordinary fecundity and the absence
of natural enemies. ey supported suggestions that importing a certain class of
‘natural enemies’ of the rabbit—but not such as would injure lambs—would relieve
the country of a serious economic threat to pastoral agriculture. eir report of May
1876 called for a remedy that should be ‘immediate, compulsory and universal’,
and urged the colonial secretary in Wellington to deem the matter of sucient
public importance to make it the subject of legislation by the General Assembly.30
A few months later, the Rabbit Nuisance Committee of the New Zealand House
of Representatives recommended that a bill should be introduced to parliament
without delay.31
Many businesses were about to be challenged by rabbits, but, faced with a completely
unprecedented problem, they had no way to predict the size of the threat to their
prots. For example, the National Mortgage and Agency Company of New Zealand
Ltd (NMA) in Dunedin was a leading stock and station company, supplying
livestock, seeds and equipment to pastoral runholders, and handling the sales of the
wool and tallow they produced. ey were among the rst commercial entities at
risk, but their directors saw no reason to be alarmed. In 1875 NMA’s founder J. M.
Ritchie wrote: ‘I hear that Johnson has been spending upwards of £15 a week to try
to keep down the rabbits. He is using men and dogs. Far better to get some ferrets.’
irteen years later, in 1888, a member of the board, W. S. Davidson, speaking at
a meeting of NMA shareholders in London, said: ‘I have not the slightest doubt
that we shall very easily keep the rabbits down in New Zealand. It only requires an
increase in the numerous stoats and weasels which have been sent out to keep the
pests in check. In a few years we shall be little troubled by rabbits.’ e author of the
centenary history of the company commented:
30 Richardson and Pearson, ‘e Rabbit Nuisance in Southland’. e colonial secretary was the minister
responsible for internal aairs, and was unconnected with the oce of the Secretary of State for the Colonies in
London.
31 Hodgkinson, ‘Report of the Rabbit Nuisance Committee’.

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Here were two intelligent, prudent and successful men, quite sure that the rabbit
problem was only a passing phase … in the interval between the two statements
[1875 to 1888] … the Government had lost more than £315,000 [a year] in rentals
from leasehold [pastoral] lands, and the annual national loss was being estimated
at£2,000,000.32
Parry’s gures dier from those given previously by Teschemaker, but the message
is the same.
Attempts to prohibit the importing of natural enemies
Arguments over the wisdom of importing predators to attack rabbits soon
developedinto a serious political issue, focused on the strongly worded protests
from ornithologists concerned about the risk to endemic fauna, including avian
predators native to New Zealand.33 e same year, Sir George Grey attempted
to prohibit the importation of foxes, polecats, stoats and weasels.34 Heproposed
aNoxious Animals Introduction Prevention Bill that would have made such imports
illegal. (Actually, foxes had already been prohibited in 1867, because of their known
appetite for lambs, and the rst mustelids had already been imported privately.)
e debate was stimulated at least as much by concerns about the potential damage
to acclimatised game birds as by the potential threat to native birds. Grey’s bill was
passed by the House of Representatives, but the upper house, the Legislative Council,
refused to consider it. Many members of the council were wealthy runholders at
risk of losing serious amounts of money if the rabbit pest could not be controlled.
Southern newspapers applauded the council’s refusal to ban the imports, since they
saw the natural enemies of the rabbit as more signicant as defenders of the colony’s
commercial income from wool and crops than as threats to domestic poultry and
game birds.
Despite the vigorous disputes, the imports remained legal.35 Just to make sure,
whenMcMeckan, Blackwood & Co., a rm of stock agents in Melbourne, received
orders to export ferrets to Blu in 1878, they took the precaution of asking for
permission from the colonial secretary in Wellington. ey received the reply:
‘ere is no law against it, and ferrets are not mentioned in §2d of Protection
ofAnimals Act1873.’36
32 G. Parry, N.M.A. e Story of the First 100 Years: e National Mortgage and Agency Company of New Zealand
Ltd 1864–1964 (Dunedin: e National Mortgage and Agency Company of New Zealand Ltd., 1964), 122.
33 Otago Witness, 9 December 1876.
34 P. K. Wells, ‘“An enemy of the rabbit”: the social context of acclimatisation of an immigrant killer’, Environment
and History 12 (2006): 297–324, doi.org/10.3197/096734006778226373.
35 House of Representatives, ‘Amendment to Protection of Animals Bill’ [re bannning imports of mustelids],
New Zealand Parliamentary Debates (Wellington: G. Didsbury, Government Printer, 1876), 273.
36 W. Bishop, Letter 13 July to Colonial Secretary asking permission to land 2 dozen ferrets, 1878. Archives New
Zealand, Wellington, R24273700.

The chronology of a sad historical misjudgement
149
Early private importations of ferrets
Not every ferret that reached New Zealand was brought in for rabbit control. A few
ferrets found their way in even before rabbits became a nuisance—as demonstrated
by an advertisement of 1852 oering three pairs for sale, and another in 1860
oering four ferrets at 35 shillings a pair. In 1867, the Bella Mary brought 10 ferrets
from Hobart, ‘which will be parted with on reasonable terms’.37 Ferrets had long
been useful for purposes other than release, such as for clearing buildings of rats, so
private imports had been going on since the late 1860s. For example, the Canterbury
Acclimatisation Society brought in ve ferrets in 1867, plus another one in 1868,
and kept them at its gardens in Christchurch.38
‘Working ferrets’ were trained to hunt rabbits alongside a man and a team of dogs
(Figure 2). Ferrets were inserted into the burrows to ush the rabbits out into the
jaws of the dogs, and afterwards retrieved. Good working ferrets were valuable
property, and well cared for because they were part of their owners’ toolkits. Farmers
advertising for labourers favoured rabbiters with their own ferrets, and immigrants
skilled in such work were much in demand. ese ferrets were not intended for
release, and any that got lost were not expected to be able to survive for long
independently ofhuman partners.
e area of ground that a ferreting team could cover was limited, and the need to
control rabbits over vast areas of seldom-visited mountain country was very great.
So it was the runholders in those districts who were the rst to try importing private
shipments of ferrets for release on their own land, and to persuade the government
to do the same for Crown lands, and on a large scale. Inevitably, the emphasis shifted
to importing ferrets in very large numbers, specically to be liberated into the wild.
e chances of the released ferrets surviving long enough to establish a wild
population varied with the habitat and climate of the distribution area, and with
their own ability to adapt to an independent life. One objection to releasing captive-
bred ferrets was that, after generations of selection for the docile qualities preferred
in tame domestic animals, they might be unable to make a living independently.
atwas certainly an issue at rst, when young ferrets were turned out straight
from a comfortable hutch into the unprotected wild. One of the ferrets’ keenest
supporters, Teschemaker, conceded that domestic ferrets were more delicate than
the stoat or weasel, and did not survive the English winter if left unprotected.
NewZealand was dierent, he added, because there was so much food available for
them, and they could survive well here, especially if they were trained to hunt and
kill before being turned out.39
37 Lyttelton Times, 7 August 1852; Daily Southern Cross, 27 January 1860; New Zealand Herald, 1 February 1867.
38 G. M. omson, e naturalisation of animals and plants in New Zealand (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1922), 70, doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.28093.
39 C. de V. Teschemaker, Letter to Major Atkinson [NZ Premier] on obtaining information on stoats and weasels,
1883. Archives New Zealand, Wellington, R24413234.

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Otago
Soon after rabbits arrived in Otago in the mid-1860s, the economic viability of the
backcountry sheep stations, including two of the largest, Earnscleugh and Galloway,
began to decline rapidly. By June 1875, the local papers were reporting that the
squatters (runholders) were planning to do something about the rabbits, starting
with ordering supplies of ferrets for Earnscleugh and Galloway stations (Figure 1).
is rst ‘supply’ of ferrets for Earnscleugh amounted to only ve animals in 1875,
but then in the 1880s the station sta started breeding their own ferrets for release.40
e ferrets did not save Earnscleugh; it was resumed by the Crown (that is, it was
abandoned by the leaseholder) in 1895, by which time it could carry only 12,000
sheep, half the number it had supported in 1879.
Life at Benmore station, in the Waitaki Valley in northern Otago, is well recorded
in a series of diaries and letters written by the station manager omas Middleton,
and summarised by Robert Pinney.41 Ferrets were rst taken there in 1875, and by
1881 they were ‘all over the run’.42 Middleton attributed his moderate early success
in reducing the numbers of rabbits in part to the work of ferrets, but regretted that
they were so vulnerable to the eects of the highly infectious and lethal disease
canine distemper, and of eating the carcases of poisoned rabbits.
e unpublished ledgers of the Dunedin oce of the New Zealand Loan &
Mercantile Agency Co. are being prepared for cataloguing by the Hocken Library.
Among them, Peter Holland found several entries for consignments of mustelids
to J. C. Buckland at Tumai, dating from 1882.43 ese animals were presumably
imported into Blu (probably from Melbourne) and forwarded to the Dunedin
oce for distribution to client landholders.
40 R. Peden, Making Sheep Country: Mt Peel station and the transformation of the tussock lands (Auckland: Auckland
University Press, 2011).
41 R. Pinney, Notebook M1: Extracts from Benmore Letter Books, 1877–1887. Hocken Collections, Otago
University, MS–3178/013.
42 Pinney, Early Northern Otago Runs.
43 Waikouaiti, 27 November 1882: ‘Ferrets from Invercargill £6-17-6’; 23 December 1882: ‘Ferrets
from Invercargill £24-10-0’; 9 April 1884 ‘Exp[ense]s re stoats, ferrets etc, 13s 0d’. Peter Holland, personal
communication.

The chronology of a sad historical misjudgement
151
Figure 2: A rabbiter working with a cooperating team of dogs and ferrets.
Source: Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, AWNS‑19241211‑41‑2.

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Southland
Cuthbert Cowan was a leading Southland runholder and a member of the House
ofRepresentatives. His property at Okaiterua on the Oreti River was one of the
rst to be invaded by rabbits, from 1872 onwards. Between March and July 1876,
Cowan killed 26,000 rabbits on his own 11,750 acres (4,755 ha) alone, by the
eorts of men with spades, dogs and one gun.44 He organised a private shipment of
ferrets from Britain, which arrived in late 1876:
One of the passengers by the Arawata on her last trip from Melbourne, was a young
gentleman [Allen Bowler]45 who brought 36 ferrets in the St. Osyth from England
toMelbourne and thence to this place, for rabbit killing purposes. He has proceeded
to Mr C. Cowan’s station.46
At a parliamentary enquiry in 1884, Cowan was asked if he had ever tried natural
enemies as a remedy against rabbits. He replied that he had landed 16 ferrets and
put them out on his own property. Now the country was ‘overrun with ferrets’,
which were breeding in the wild and doing no harm to lambs.47
Marlborough
In 1878, Joseph Ward of Wairau and some of his neighbours ordered a consignment
of ferrets to be dispatched from England in the sailing ship Rialto. On the voyage,
distemper broke out among them, and when the ship arrived on 6 March 1878,
only three ferrets had survived, so ‘it was a rather expensive aair’.48 Another lot
of 600 ferrets was imported by George Bullen of Kaikoura, but every one of that
consignment died. He started again with 700, and got two ferrets out of the 1,300.49
e two shipments cost some £800, for virtually no result. A later and presumably
better-managed shipment cost 10s 8½d per ferret, in part because by then it was
known that ferrets had to be kept well away from any dog with distemper. Besides
disease, another likely reason for these failures was inappropriate feeding and housing
on board ship. Gamekeepers with long experience of keeping ferrets described them
as shivery creatures that need warm, dry hutches,50 and always thirsty, so they must
be given plenty of water.51
44 Gibb and Williams, ‘e rabbit in New Zealand’, 162.
45 Immigration Register for 1876. Archives New Zealand, Wellington, R5013063 Im W2/2.
46 Southland Times, 15 November 1876, 2.
47 G. Randall Johnson, ‘Report of the Joint Committee on Sheep and Rabbit Acts’, AJHR I–5 (1884).
48 Anon., ‘Report of the Rabbit Nuisance Committee’ [1880–81], AJHR I–06 (1881).
49 Randall Johnson, ‘Report of the Joint Committee on Sheep and Rabbit Acts’.
50 R. Jeeries, e Gamekeeper at Home (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978 [rst published 1878]).
51 Marchington, Pugs and Drummers: Ferrets and Rabbits in Britain.

The chronology of a sad historical misjudgement
153
Bullen also encouraged British ferreters to emigrate to New Zealand, bringing their
working ferret and dog teams with them. ese shipments were more successful,
not least because these animals were accompanied by experienced ferret-keepers.
For example, the ship Warwick left Plymouth on 30 November 1878, arriving at
Lyttelton on 3 March 1879. e Nelson Evening Mail announced that the Warwick
carried two rabbit-catchers accompanied by their ferrets and dogs, and engaged to
work for ‘a runholder at the Kaikouras’. ey were to be paid between 4s 6d and 2s
6d per dozen rabbit skins, depending on the time of year. e Warwick’s passenger
list names all the men on board with their trades: two of them, David Cook and
David Lang, both 23 and both from Fife, were listed as rabbit-catchers.52 Bullen is
named in another report as the runholder engaging them.
Other Marlborough runholders tried a dierent tactic. Fell Brothers, agents for the
Starborough station near Blenheim, oered to pay stewards and others working
on the wool ships 12 shillings a head for all ferrets landed alive and in healthy
condition. e adverts were repeated at least ve times over the next two months.53
If any ferrets came in this way, they could only have been in small numbers.
North Island
Wild rabbits liberated in the southern Wairarapa near Carterton had greatly
increased in numbers by 1870,54 and by 1875 they had reached William Beetham’s
station Brancepeth, southwest of Masterton, about 15 km away.55 Further south,
the Huangarua station near Martinborough was owned from 1869 to 1878 by
the Hon. George Waterhouse, a Wellington politician and pastoralist. He had had
rabbits on his property since about 1871. Waterhouse was one of the speakers in the
Legislative Council debate on whether to impose a ban on introduced predators in
1876. He must have been relieved at the decision that private imports were not to be
prohibited, because during the debate he revealed that ‘he had, within the last three
or four months, turned loose a considerable number of ferrets’.56
e result was apparently good. Runholders in Southland read, perhaps with a touch
of envy, reports that the ferrets imported by Waterhouse, released on pastures thick
with rabbits, had cleared them out completely by January 1877, right down to the
last one in the neighbourhood. Such unequivocal statements are now impossible to
test, but seem to modern eyes incautious: absence of evidence (of rabbits surviving
the arrival of ferrets in a locality) is not evidence of absence of rabbits, there
oranywhere.
52 Nelson Evening Mail, 4 March 1879, 2; Ship’s papers for Warwick Nov. 1878 – Mar. 1879. Archives New
Zealand, Wellington, R 4085568 Im 15/345.
53 For example, Evening Post, 5 December 1881, 3.
54 Gibb and Williams, ‘e rabbit in New Zealand’, 162.
55 W. H. McLean, Rabbits Galore (Wellington: A. H. and A. W. Reed, 1966).
56 House of Representatives, ‘Amendment to Protection of Animals Bill’ [re bannning imports of mustelids],
New Zealand Parliamentary Debates (1876), 273.

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The Rabbit Nuisance Act 1881
By 1880 the government could no longer ignore the outcry from formerly wealthy
runholders facing ruin from rabbit damage. eir inuence had been the main
reason for the failure of Grey’s 1876 attempt to prohibit the import of the natural
enemy of the rabbits. Now, as rabbits steadily advanced through Otago from
Southland, they wanted more decisive action. Native predators (harrier hawks:
Circus approximans; and the predatory ightless weka: Gallirallus australis hectori)
killed many rabbits at rst, but soon it became clear that leaving the task to them
alone was not going to be enough. omas Middleton, manager of the Hon. Robert
Campbell’s Benmore station in the Waitaki River Valley, northern Otago (Figure 1),
wrote to his employer in May 1881 that rabbits were becoming a serious concern on
the estate.57 He begged Campbell to do something urgently:
Now, if ever, is the time to prevent them becoming a nuisance … I can’t help dreading
the fate of Southland for the Waitaki unless we stir ourselves and combat the vermin
before it is in their power to do us harm.58
Alas, serious harm was already being done. By 1881 the rental income to the
government from the half-million acres (202,342 ha) of runs severely aected by
rabbits had dropped from £2,288 a year to £619, and the nancial cost to the
whole colony in lost exports had escalated to at least £500,000 a year. On one of
Campbell’s runs, Galloway (68,000 ha), rabbit control in 1880 cost him £3,000
(equivalent to $486,193 now) for a return of £1,500; 26,000 ha of the run was
incapable of feeding sheep in winter. Burwood, another of Campbell’s runs, used
to carry 80,000 sheep, but could by then support only 24,000. Campbell gave up
on this and six more of his runs in 1881; four were relet at a lower rent, and three
were simply abandoned. e national ock fell from 13 million sheep in 1878
to11.5million in 1879.59
e Rabbit Nuisance Committee reported detailed statements from 15 witnesses.
ey specically wanted to see all landholders required to bear their proportionate
share of the cost of destroying rabbits, and provision made for protecting the natural
enemies of the rabbit already in the colony.
Among the witnesses was Bullen. He presented a succinct argument in favour
ofrelying on ferrets to solve the rabbit problem:
I am glad to say the ferrets have done, and are still doing, a great work for us in
checking the rabbits; and I do believe the ferrets will be the salvation of the country
… My rm belief is, the rabbit-catchers do more harm than good: they kill everything
57 Pinney, Early Northern Otago Runs.
58 Pinney, Notebook M1: Extracts from Benmore Letter Books, 1877–1887. Hocken Collections, Otago
University, MS–3178/013.
59 Anon., ‘Report of the Rabbit Nuisance Committee’ [1880–81].

The chronology of a sad historical misjudgement
155
that kills a rabbit … We turned out ferrets about eight years ago, and have been
turning out … about two hundred a year, which we shall continue as long as we
see any rabbits around … is country … is considerably over 100,000 acres, and
Ibelieve there are many hundreds of ferrets on it; we leave it entirely to them to do
the work, keeping one man to breed and act as keeper over the ferrets.60
e experience of Bullen, among others, convinced the colonial government to
take action. e existing Rabbit Nuisance Act 1876 had provided only for a system
of district rabbit trustees with powers to raise funds from landowners to help pay
for the work of dealing with rabbits (excluding unoccupied Crown and Native
lands). isdid not work well, largely because it could not prevent landholders who
disagreed with it from simply walking away. Some more vigorous action was needed.
In November 1881 a new and energetic Chief Inspector, Benjamin P. Bayly, was
appointed.61 Bayly was a strong supporter of the idea of importing mustelids to
control rabbits, so he immediately set to work on organising ocial purchases of
ferrets for release on Crown lands. He also helped to draft new legislation62 that
provided for resident rabbit inspectors in every district, armed with the power to
hold individual landholders responsible for controlling rabbits on their own land.
Defaulters could be ned up to £20, which seemed the crowning insult to many
runholders already facing unavoidable nancial losses due to rabbits. e new Act
also gave legal protection for all natural enemies of the rabbit already present (ferrets,
cats, stoats, weasels and mongooses, but not the weka, because it was traditional
food for Māori).63 e penalty for killing any one of these was up to £10, and
there were no exemptions, even to protect poultry or carefully nurtured game birds.
Withminor alterations, this Act remained in force for many years.
As the advancing horde of rabbits moved northwards from Southland into Otago,
the government planned to establish resident populations of natural enemies to stand
in their way. e need to do this was considered especially urgent where labour-
intensive methods of rabbit control were impossible, such as on the unoccupied
Crown lands of the remote backcountry. So thousands of ferrets were released
on the mountains dividing the headwaters of the main eastward-owing rivers,
and on the western sides of the lakes. is policy was not understood at the time,
or later—especially by those concerned about the protection of native birds. For
example, Edward Melland held two pastoral leases in far western Otago, Eglinton
394 and Cheviot 396 (Figure 1). He was also a scientist, and was twice president of
60 Ibid., 17.
61 ‘Notices’ [Appointment of B. P. Bayly], New Zealand Gazette, 18 November 1881, 2.
62 Rabbit Nuisance Act (1881): www.nzlii.org/nz/legis/hist_act/rna188145v1881n6222.
63 C. M. King, ‘Contemporary observations of predation on the bu weka (Gallirallus australis hectori) byferrets
in the South Island during the nineteenth century’, Notornis 64 (2017): 52–5.

International Review of Environmental History • Volume 3, Issue 1, 2017
156
the Otago Branch of the Royal Society of New Zealand. In 1889, Melland criticised
the government’s ‘incredible folly’ in turning out ferrets on the west shore of Lake
Manapouri, where kakapo, then still common, are now extinct.64
Reactions to the new Act
Rearguard protests continued in the House of Representatives. In July 1882 the
colonial secretary was asked, in view of the conicting opinions expressed as to
the introduction of ferrets and weasels to overcome the rabbit nuisance, would
government cause the matter to be more fully considered? e minister replied that
the government had not sucient reason to doubt the expediency of importing
ferrets as a means of overcoming the rabbit nuisance.65 e government continued,
not only commissioning many imports itself, but also subsidising private enterprises
doing the same.
Settlers’ meetings debated the new Rabbit Act exhaustively and often angrily.
Forexample, the Marlborough Express reported in great detail the proceedings of
two successive meetings in Blenheim in October and November 1881. In the face
of a growing fear that, if the advance of the rabbits was not stopped, they might as
well give up sheep farming altogether, every possible method of meeting the Act’s
requirements had its passionate advocates. For some, poisoning and fencing were
the only solutions; for others, organised breeding and distribution of ferrets. Some
relied on trapping to remove the rabbit pest, while others pointed out that rabbiters
could not be expected to remove the source of their employment, and their traps
also killed many natural enemies of the rabbit.
Plagued by repeated and increasingly hostile correspondence, the government was
forced to justify its policy. Bayly dismissed all objections to government releases
ofmustelids in the backcountry as coming from those who had
evidently never been south or seen the damage caused by the rabbit pest … [andare
unaware that] private individuals have and are introducing the natural enemy and
turning these animals out within the settled districts … I am as strongly as ever
a believer in the introduction of the natural enemy … to save the large tracts of
pastoral country in Canterbury that are threatened with an inux of rabbits from
the boundary of the Otago country … [where it is] impossible to deal with [rabbits]
inthe ordinary manner, it is here especially that the natural enemy is required.66
64 E. Melland, ‘Notes on a paper entitled “e takahe in western Otago” by Mr James Park, F.G.S’, Transactions
& Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute 22 (1889): 295–300.
65 New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, 12 July 1882, 242–3.
66 Correspondence protesting introduction of stoats and weasels, 1886. Archives New Zealand, Wellington,
R24456501.

The chronology of a sad historical misjudgement
157
Not everyone was convinced that ferrets would be able to control rabbits at all,
let alone as eectively as claimed. Richard Henry (1845–1929) was an ardent
conservationist, later famous for attempting to protect New Zealand’s endemic
ightless birds from mustelids by translocating them to Resolution Island.67
He once watched a ferret failing to catch a rabbit put in an enclosure with it.
Henry recommended that anyone thinking of purchasing ferrets for release on
aproperty should rst undertake a few simple experiments, which would enable the
experimenter to estimate whether there was any point in Bayly’s ocial policy of
buying up young ferrets at 8s or 10s each, and turning them straight out of cages by
the thousands. Henry’s advice was ignored.68
Opponents continued to claim that ferrets would prove to be a cure worse than the
disease, but any such prediction could be countered by reassurances from supporters
of the programme, such as C. J. Tully. He told the Joint Committee on Sheep and
Rabbits in 1884 that ferrets were so easy to catch, there was no need to fear that
ferrets would become too numerous.69
Official ferret importations, 1882–86
By the time of Bayly’s rst report to the House of Representatives in 1882, he was
able to say that several shipments of ferrets had been procured from Melbourne, and
small lots were expected regularly by sailing vessels from England.70 e inwards
letter books kept at the colonial secretary’s oce in Wellington record a long series
of letters from London in that year concerning shipments of ferrets. Most of these
letters are now lost, so it is now dicult to tell where the animals came from, but one
letter of 5 October 1882 from the agent-general in London mentions ashipment
sent in September by a dealer ‘from the Clyde’.71 e public accounts for 1881–82
list expenditures of £122 10s for purchasing ferrets and £28 15s for their hutches.72
e annual volumes of Statistics of the Colony of New Zealand include comprehensive
listings of imports and exports by item and origin. Under ‘Animals, living’, a total
of 1,972 animals listed as ‘Livestock: other kinds’ are recorded as having been
imported from Australia and the UK between 1870 and 1880 inclusive, that is,
before the arrival of the rst stoats and weasels. Another 590 animals were recorded
67 S. Hill and J. Hill, Richard Henry of Resolution Island (Dunedin: John McIndoe, 1987).
68 R. Henry, e New Zealand Rabbit and its prey (Christchurch: Lyttelton Times, 1887).
69 ‘Report of the Joint Committee on Sheep and Rabbit Acts’, AJHR I–5 (1884): 137.
70 B. P. Bayly, ‘Livestock and Rabbits (Report as to Rabbits)’, AJHR H–21 (1882).
71 Agent-General, ‘Forwarding information re Marten cat’, 1882. Archives New Zealand, Wellington,
R24375311.
72 ‘Public Accounts of the Government of New Zealand’, AJHR B–01 (1881–82).

International Review of Environmental History • Volume 3, Issue 1, 2017
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as having been imported in the ve years 1882–86; though listed as ‘Ferrets and
weasels’, until 1885 they were mostly ferrets from Australia, where there were no
stoats or weasels.73
Bayly’s early enthusiasm was quickly tempered by unpleasant surprises. A serious
problem with transporting ferrets around the world was that, as Bullen had already
discovered, these shipments were often disastrous failures. A letter from the colonial
secretary in Wellington to the agent-general in London, dated 9 September 1882,
included a memorandum listing the very high mortality rates of shipments of ferrets
from Britain.74 e losses in transit were caused partly by inexpert handling, and
partly by the great susceptibility of ferrets to canine distemper, which between them
killed at least three entire shipments, each of up to 600 ferrets.
Among the suppliers of live animals for export from England was a well-known
animal dealer, William Cross of Liverpool. He sent 120 ferrets, accompanied by
750 pigeons, 10 sacks of biscuits and 375 tins of Nestle’s milk as food for the ferrets
on the voyage, to ‘a large wool farmer’ in New Zealand. Cross quoted his client as
believing he was facing ruin unless he could prevent the rabbits from eating up the
pasture on which his sheep ought to be feeding, so he told Cross to send the order
regardless of the expense.75
Curiously enough, at about the same time Mr Cross was also commissioned to send
2,000 live rabbits to British Columbia. News editors in New Zealand were quick
to point out the irony of Mr Cross supplying rabbits to be introduced into one
country, and carnivores to help the extermination of introduced rabbits in another
country. Why, they asked in England (and in New Zealand), have not the western
Canadians learned from what rabbits have done to New Zealand and Australia?76
Bayly’s 1883 report to the Rabbit Nuisance Committee listed the losses recorded
from 25 shipments of ferrets landed between March 1882 and 30 June 1883:
Of a total of 1217 ferrets shipped from England, 178 were landed alive, at a cost of
£953, plus 241 shipped from Melbourne between March and April 1882, ofwhich
198 landed alive, at a cost of £224—to which must be added 122 for natural
increase, less 157 that died from distemper. In total, 376 ferrets were landed alive by
Government.77
73 C. M. King, ‘Pandora’s box down-under: Origins and numbers of mustelids transported to New Zealand for
biological control of rabbits’, Biological Invasions (2017): doi.org/10.1007/s10530-017-1392-6.
74 Colonial Secretary, Letter 9 September to Agent General [Cover letter re Bayly report ferret deaths], Outwards
Letterbook–Agent-General, 1882. Archives New Zealand, Wellington, R20557923.
75 Evening Post, 17 December 1887, 1.
76 e Standard, London, reprinted in Hawke’s Bay Herald, 29 December 1887, 3.
77 B. P. Bayly, ‘Annual Report on the Rabbit Nuisance’ [1882–83], AJHR H–18 (1883).

The chronology of a sad historical misjudgement
159
e nal straw was the voyage of the sailing barque Lastingham, commissioned
in London by the agent-general in April 1883 to carry a shipment of ferrets to
New Zealand under the care of Francis Court.78 All the ferrets died on the way.
e colonial secretary directed the agent-general to dispatch all future shipments
in steamships, and to ensure that all consignments be accompanied by someone
‘withknowledge of the animal’.79
On top of losses in transit, competition with private interests was making it
increasingly dicult for the government to meet its strategy of obtaining large
cohorts of ferrets for liberation on Crown lands. Bayly found that the private demand
for ferrets meant that the government had been able to buy only two or three lots
during the year 1883–84. Teschemaker complained: ‘I lately sent to Dunedin for
20pairs of ferrets … [the dealer] could only supply me with six pairs and I was told
he could have sold them ten times over.’80
By the end of 1883, it became clear that the policy of importing ferrets was never
going to be economic. Local breeding was fast becoming a feasible and more
attractive alternative, so Bayly shifted to a dierent strategy, the purchasing of ferrets
bred in the colony for sale to the government at a xed price per head. Ocial
importations of ferrets ended in 1884,81 although private shipments continued until
at least 1886.
Ferret‑breeding programmes, 1882–c.1920s
e earliest ferret-breeding programme was established in the mid-1870s in
Christchurch by the Canterbury Acclimatisation Society. e curator of its
gardens, A. M. Johnson, kept ferrets there for Mr Morton, a member of the society,
on whose behalf he sold some of them; two were still there in 1874.82 A larger
breeding programme began there in 1882, when 20 ferrets were brought in for the
government, which was to pay for their food and upkeep, at a daily cost of 3¼d
per ferret. A hutch was built for them costing £46 12s. By December 1882 their
numbers had increased to 60, and their hutch was enlarged.83
In 1882, the government established three new depots for breeding ferrets, at Waimata
and Masterton in the North Island, and near Christchurch in the South Island, and
many other establishments followed, as listed by local rabbit inspectors contributing
78 Agent-General, Letter No. 82 of 4 April to Colonial Secretary: Shipment of ferrets per ‘Lastingham’ in charge
of F. Court, Inwards Letter Book (1883): 316. Archives New Zealand, Wellington.
79 Colonial Secretary, Letter 1 August to Agent General [Ferrets to be carried on steamships], Outwards
Letterbook–Agent-General (1883). Archives New Zealand, Wellington, R20557923.
80 Teschemaker, Letter to Major Atkinson on obtaining information on stoats and weasels (1883).
81 B. P. Bayly, ‘Annual Report on the Rabbit Nuisance’ [1883–84], AJHR II H–02 (1884).
82 R. C. Lamb, Birds, beasts and shes: e rst hundred years of the North Canterbury Acclimatisation Society
(Christchurch: North Canterbury Acclimatisation Society, 1964), 19.
83 Lamb, Birds, beasts and shes, 21.

International Review of Environmental History • Volume 3, Issue 1, 2017
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to Bayly’s annual reports. Most of these animals were bred for distribution and
release on Crown lands, but private owners, notably Bullen in Marlborough, ran
their own programmes, turning out up to an additional 500 ferrets in one season.
e total numbers of ferrets released by all parties reached extraordinary levels by
the mid-1880s.
e Joint Committee of the Canterbury Chamber of Commerce and the Canterbury
Agricultural and Pastoral Association feared rabbits arriving in Canterbury in
their myriads. ey were condent that judicious placement of natural enemies
through the backcountry would prevent such an invasion, and in December 1887
the Christchurch Press summarised a public meeting held to consider their report.
e committee urged the government to accelerate the production processes by
oering a bonus for ferret breeding.
Among the large stations establishing their own ferret-breeding facilities was
Benmore, which had a breeding stock of 112 doe and 23 buck ferrets at the
homestead, and also bought ferrets bred at Quail Burn and Mount Royal, also in
Otago. In April 1888, 689 ferrets were turned out on the station, most of them
locally bred. Still, rabbit numbers remained astronomical: 40,000 were killed on
Benmore in February–March 1889 alone.84
While the demand lasted and ocial encouragement continued, the ferret-breeding
business paid some enterprising operators very well. In September 1888, George
Steel of the New Zealand Country Journal visited a private ferret stud at Wairuna
Hills (inland from Balclutha) run by Messrs Allen and Riggs. ey had a contract
to supply the colonial government with 10,000 ferrets a year for three years, at 7s
6d a head. e breeding stock numbered 200 full-grown ferrets, of which 40 were
males. ey ate 30 rabbits a day, plus the milk of three cows, and every detail of
their diet, housing, mating, and nursing of ospring was carefully managed to keep
them healthy.85
Ferret breeding was a long-term and risky operation, so the government had to oer
private breeders a guaranteed purchase price for their ferrets in order to get them to
invest in it. Such a system created an unforeseen problem: an attractive opportunity
for dishonest proteering. In districts where large numbers of ferrets had already
been turned out, a high price oered for live ferrets gave rabbiters an incentive to
poach wild ferrets and oer them for sale. In order to ensure that sheep inspectors
were not buying back their own previously released ferrets, the government had
tochange the rules to authorise purchases only from known breeders.86
84 Pinney, Early Northern Otago Runs; R. Pinney, Notebook L: Extracts from Benmore Diaries, 1866–88.
Hocken Collections, Otago University, MS–3178/012.
85 George Steel in the New Zealand Country Journal, quoted in Otago Witness, 28 September 1888, 7.
86 A. Macdonald, [Authority to buy ferrets], 1886. Archives New Zealand, Wellington, R24456331.

The chronology of a sad historical misjudgement
161
In turn, local sheep inspectors had to check if more ferrets were needed. For
example,in February 1886, W. A. Smith wrote to E. Clifton, the sheep inspector
at Kaikoura, oering ferrets for sale at 10s each. Bayly conrmed that ferrets were
needed for turning out on Crown lands, so the colonial secretary authorised Clifton
to buy as many young, healthy and properly seasoned ferrets as were oered, at not
more than 10s each, or less if possible.87
In the southern South Island, the local rabbit inspectors believed that ferrets had
proved their worth, because in some areas the rabbits were rapidly disappearing,
and in their place ferrets could be found in considerable numbers. Bayly’s 1887
annual report on the rabbit nuisance lists a total of 1,922 ferret releases during
the year (800 in Southland alone), and others went unrecorded. e inspector for
Gore, Angus Macdonald, reported that ferret breeding had become an industry in
his district, and agreed that breeders should be licensed to reduce the temptation
totrac illegally in government stock.88
e following year’s annual report claimed with pride that ferret breeding was now
being carried out on a large scale; 3,600 ferrets had been bred and 2,755 released in
Otago, 367 in Canterbury, 480 in Marlborough, in addition to more than 4,000
by private owners. A separate report lists contracts on foot for a total of 21,760
ferrets to be supplied to the government’s stock department from 1 January 1887 to
8June 1888. All the consignees were rabbit inspectors in the South Island, although
afootnote adds that fewer than half of the contracts were expected to be met.89
The end of the official strategy, 1889–91
Eventually there had to be an end to this programme, and it came during 1888–89.
In 1889, Bayly was demoted, and the government withdrew all support for his
policies. e independent Joint Committee on Livestock and Rabbits produced
its annual report in September 1889, protesting against the sudden change, but to
no eect. e rabbit inspector for Otago, Alfred Douglas, had reported that 2,230
ferrets had been produced for purchase by the government and turned out on the
high country in 1890, but when breeders found that the government had stopped
all contracts, they simply released 5,000 of their stock.90
From then on, private enterprise was left to meet the demand for mustelids by
direct negotiation with purchasers. A private shipment of 185 ‘polecats’ and ferrets
intended for the South Island and dispatched in the Aorangi from London on
9January 1891 did nothing to help the shortage, since only two arrived alive; the
87 W. A. Smith, [Ferrets for sale], 1886. Archives New Zealand, Wellington, R24455151.
88 B. P. Bayly, ‘Annual Report on the Rabbit Nuisance’ [1886–87], AJHR H–18 (1887).
89 Stock Department, ‘e supply of ferrets (contracts made by Stock Department)’, AJHR H–31 (1888).
90 Anon., ‘Annual Report on the Rabbit Nuisance’ [1889–90], AJHR H–9 (1890).

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rest died on the voyage. But private breeders gradually recovered their condence
in the ferret-breeding business to supply the newly established rabbit boards, and
the local ferret production industry continued long after all shipments of mustelids
ended in 1892.91
For example, the North Wairarapa Board turned loose about 1,000 ferrets in
1892–93, and in Marlborough, hundreds of ferrets were liberated in that spring
and summer, with many more following.92 In February 1899, the sheep inspector
at Gore, E. Field, wrote to Ritchie that he could get local breeders to commit to
producing any number of ferrets up to 1,000 at 5s each, provided the government
guaranteed it would purchase them in September. Ritchie recommended that Field
order 1,000–1,500 for liberation on Crown lands, where Ritchie considered that the
natural enemy were doing excellent work in the high country.93
In all, the 50-year history of attempts to use ferrets to control rabbits in the South
Island involved tens of thousands of animals. Clark cites an unpublished estimate
by the historian R. M. Burdon that overall ‘upward of 75,000’ ferrets were bred and
released.94 e written records are full of astonishing gures that are too fragmentary
and scattered, and too often overlapping, to add up to an actual count, but they are
consistent with Burdon’s gure taken over the long term. With hindsight, we may
now ask to what extent this unprecedented programme achieved its aim.
Effects of mustelids on rabbit numbers
First, it is necessary to draw a clear distinction between two quite dierent predator–
prey relationships. Island species that evolved in habitats free of any four-footed
mammalian predators, which include all of New Zealand’s most strongly endemic
birds, typically have very low breeding and mortality rates. Suddenly increased
subtraction imposed by a new invader can easily beat multiplication of the residents,
and reproduction is overwhelmed by unmanageable losses, as is illustrated by the long
list of New Zealand’s extinct birds.95 Lethal control of invasive predators to protect
a threatened island fauna is eective and fully justied,96 up to a limit correlated
91 Statistics of the Colony of New Zealand for the years 1870 to 1899 [Blue Books].
92 J. D. Ritchie, ‘Report of the Secretary for Agriculture and Chief Inspector of Stock’, AJHR H–21 (1893).
93 [Complaints about natural enemies], 1896–98. Archives New Zealand, Wellington, R1762009.
94 Clark, e invasion of New Zealand, 266.
95 A. J. D. Tennyson, ‘e origin and history of New Zealand’s terrestrial vertebrates’, New Zealand Journal
ofEcology 34 (2010): 6–27.
96 J. C. Russell et al., ‘Importance of lethal control of invasive predators for island conservation’, Conservation
Biology 30, no. 3 (2016): 670–2, doi.org/10.1111/cobi.12666.

The chronology of a sad historical misjudgement
163
with the size and location of the island and the number of human residents.97 Such
programmes on uninhabited islands—even very large ones—are now routinely
successful, in part because islands oer a better chance of preventing reinvasion.
at is a completely dierent matter from the reactions of mainland species familiar
(in the biological sense) with each other as natural predators and prey. A ‘natural
enemy’ in this sense is the product of an evolved interaction that includes the
mutually adaptive population dynamics and exible behaviour that allow long-term
coexistence at landscape scale. e impact of invasive rodents and mustelids on New
Zealand’s native fauna was overwhelmingly of the disastrous new-invader kind; that
of ferrets on rabbits, the accommodating old-enemy kind.
Ferrets soon spread throughout the open country of both main islands of New
Zealand, and, contrary to expectations, they survived the Otago winter easily in
warm, dry burrows, provided there was enough food—the only conditions they
cannot tolerate are being wet, cold and hungry for too long.98 But there was no
sustained and widespread benecial eect of ferret predation on the national rabbit
population.
Bullen was the rst to try ferrets on a large and systematic scale on his run at
Kaikoura, and he was the rst to nd the formula required to make ferrets serve his
interests rather than their own. He was successful enough to be able to suspend all
other forms of rabbit control on his land. He understood, as few others did, that
ferrets could aect rabbit populations only given certain conditions.
First, that rabbit numbers have to be rst reduced so far as possible by other means.
e quickest way of doing this was by poisoning the rabbits in winter, but the
timing had to be correct to avoid the risk of ferrets eating the poisoned rabbits;
otherwise they would be found dead all over the run.
Second, that ferrets must be turned out in early spring and in sucient numbers;
those liberated only a few at a time on thickly infested ground could not be expected
to cope with the number and increase in rabbits.
ird, that no rabbit trappers can be employed anywhere that ferrets are working,
since rabbit traps kill ferrets as well as rabbits. As one runholder reported: ‘So long
as we employed rabbiters, the rabbits increased’.99 Another ‘tried [rabbit] trapping
and caught 70 ferrets’.100
97 D. R. Towns and K. G. Broome, ‘From small Maria to massive Campbell: Forty years of rat eradications from
New Zealand islands’, New Zealand Journal of Zoology 30, no. 4 (2003): 377–98, doi.org/10.1080/03014223.200
3.9518348.
98 omson, ‘A history of the ferret’, 471–80.
99 Walter Gibson, cited in ‘Report of the Joint Committee on Sheep and Rabbit Acts’, AJHR I–5 (1884), 122.
100 C. J. Tully, cited in ‘Report of the Joint Committee on Sheep and Rabbit Acts’, AJHR I–5 (1884), 137.

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Fourth, that domestic ferrets should be trained to kill live rabbits before release into
the wild.
Fifth, that owners of neighbouring properties should act together, or properties
being treated should be protected by rabbit fences, so that land that has been cleared
is not immediately reinvaded from adjacent uncontrolled lands.
After eight years, Bullen could report in 1881 that he had many hundreds of ferrets
on his property of more than 100,000 acres. He routinely supplemented their
numbers by breeding and releasing about 200 a year, and needed no other method
of rabbit control.101
Contemporary research on managing rabbits102 supports Bullen’s view that ferrets
could potentially keep the numbers of rabbits down if they were already reduced
by some other factors and if there were enough ferrets present at, or just before, the
start of the rabbit breeding season. Ferrets can search burrows and kill whole litters
of young rabbits before they emerge, which is an eective way of preventing an
increase in numbers of adult rabbits if done intensively, but is usually not possible
unless ferret numbers are supplemented in early spring. at was the strategy
employed by several runholders in Marlborough. Walter Gibson summarised the
method for the Joint Committee:
I purchased all the ferrets I could get and turned them out. Since then I have
been working with ferrets and have been breeding a large number … e whole
of that country has been pretty well cleared of rabbits … when fresh detachments
of rabbits [arrive from higher ground] we send ferrets out. ey kill all the young
ones, consequently the whole country is now practically free of them … Bullen [his
neighbour] has been breeding ferrets for 10 years … Kaikoura district was once
almost ruined by rabbits … it was quite a desert. It is now covered with grass. I shall
breed 1,000 ferrets this year.103
e problem, in most other places, was that ferrets tended to be released in too small
numbers, or too late in the breeding season, when the advantage of their ability to
clean out whole nests of small young was already lost, or onto huge unfenced runs
where hard-won local benets were quickly reversed by unstoppable reinvasion.
101 Anon., ‘Report of the Rabbit Nuisance Committee’ [1880–81].
102 J. Parkes, ‘Rabbits as pests in New Zealand: A summary of the issues and critical information’, Contract
Report LC9495/141 (Christchurch: Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research, 1995); R. P. Pech et al., ‘Limits to
predator regulation of rabbits in Australia: evidence from predator-removal experiments’, Oecologia 89, no. 1
(1992): 102–12.
103 R. Johnson, ‘Report of the Joint Committee on Sheep and Rabbit Acts’.

The chronology of a sad historical misjudgement
165
So over the country as a whole, although wild ferrets left to their own devices
certainly did survive and breed, and they killed a lot of rabbits, ferret numbers were
and are determined by rabbit numbers rather than vice versa.104
Not everyone agreed with the runholders’ assumption that the New Zealand economy
would be ruined by rabbits. Sir James Hector, one of the colony’s leading scientists,
pointed to new economic opportunities created by the increasing international
demand for rabbit skins for fur gloves and felts, and for canned or frozen rabbit
meat. He predicted that much of the country would be more protably occupied by
rabbits than bysheep.105
Hector’s opinion led to the obvious question: could income from rabbits compensate
for loss of income from wool? e answer can be indirectly indexed from the ocial
records of income from export of rabbits compared with wool (Figure 3).
Exports of wool, one of the colony’s principal products at that time, had increased
steadily until 1876 as more runs were taken up and developed, but after 1877
exports of rabbit skins began an even faster rise. e export records clearly show
that the rabbit invasion shifted up a gear in 1877, and, especially in the years 1878–
87, it was having a severely depressing eect on the colony’s income from wool
production.106 An ocial survey listed 99 pastoral runs abandoned in Otago alone
between 1877 and 1884.107 More detailed records extracted from the farm diaries of
two sheep stations in the Waitaki Valley (1874–1907 at Otematata, and 1891–1930
at Hakataramea) are plotted by Holland and Figgins,108 and demonstrate the even
more dramatic impact of rabbits on wool production on the local scale.
For a while, the harvesting of rabbit meat provided an alternative source of
income for distressed landholders. e owners of canning factories and (after the
development of refrigerated shipping) dealers in frozen carcases paid them to cease
using poison when rabbits were in their prime, and by the 1890s these inducements
had indeed created a valuable buer against hard times, but at a cost: it created
acorps of professional rabbit farmers who conserved the stocks and resisted eective
control.109 Far from adding to the rabbit-control eort, trapping by professional
rabbiters made things worse. On properties where rabbits were harvested for meat,
104 G. Norbury, R. Heyward, and J. Parkes, ‘Short-term ecological eects of rabbit haemorrhagic disease in
theshort-tussock grasslands of the South Island, New Zealand’, Wildlife Research 29, no. 6 (2002): 599–604,
doi.org/10.1071/WR00085; G. Norbury and C. Jones, ‘Pests controlling pests: Does predator control lead to greater
European rabbit abundance in Australasia?’, Mammal Review 45 (2015): 79–87, doi.org/10.1111/mam.12034.
105 Bruce Herald, 28 February 1888.
106 Statistics of the Colony of New Zealand for the years 1870 to 1899 [Blue Books].
107 J. P. Maitland, ‘Runs abandoned in Otago during years 1877–84’, AJHR C–09 (1885): 1–3.
108 Holland and Figgins, ‘Environmental disturbance triggering infestations’, 41–79.
109 J. Hall, ‘Report, Minutes, Resolutions etc of the Australasian Stock Conference, Wellington, October 1892’,
AJHR H–2 (1893).

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rabbit numbers greatly increased during the o season.110 Government ocers
attempting to enforce the Rabbit Nuisance Act regarded such cosy arrangements
as illegal. Holland and Figgins111 provide a 1917 photograph of a rabbit canning
factory at Alexandra, and W. T. Glasgow112 lists data on rabbit meat exports.
Figure 3: Comparative value in millions of pounds sterling of exports of wool, and of
rabbits (in thousands), 1873–99. Income from rabbits was derived from exporting
dried skins (1873–93),113 then from both skins and frozen carcases with skins on
(1894–99).11 4
Source: Author’s compilation of data from the references cited.
In 1949, Clark115 asked whether income from rabbits could compensate for losses
from wool. e ocial statistics show that in 1873, wool generated an export
income of £2.7 million, compared with only £1,300 from rabbit skins. e prots
of the wool barons rapidly increased to £3.7 million in 1877, when the export value
of rabbits was £8,600. From 1878 to 1888 inclusive, the value of wool exports
stagnated between £2.9 and £3.3 million, while the value of rabbit skins escalated
to over £100,000 in those same years. Wool exports did not reach £4 million until
1889, and even in 1899 were still only £4.3 million, but still a lot more than the
£195,000 from rabbit skins and frozen meat (Figure 3).
110 J. D. Ritchie, ‘Annual Report on the Rabbit Nuisance’ [1891–92], AJHR H–19 (1892).
111 Holland and Figgins, ‘Environmental disturbance triggering infestations’, 41–79.
112 W. T. Glasgow, ‘Rabbits and rabbit-skins exported, 1894–1900’, AJHR H–47 (1901).
113 Statistics of the Colony of New Zealand for the years 1870 to 1899 [Blue Books].
114 Glasgow, ‘Rabbits and rabbit-skins exported, 1894–1900’.
115 Clark, e invasion of New Zealand.

The chronology of a sad historical misjudgement
167
In 1947, the scientist Kazimierz Wodzicki116 tried to answer the same question,
using slightly dierent assumptions. He reckoned that the economic value of one
breeding ewe, producing about 8 pounds weight of wool and one lamb a year,
was about £1 a year. His calculation of stock equivalents was based on feeding
trials showing that 15 rabbits ate as much as one sheep. If so, 50 million rabbits
would displace 3.33 million sheep, and thereby (after adding the costs of pasture
damage and subtracting the income from rabbits exported) lead to a net loss of
£3to£3.5million.
Estimated either way, the compensatory income from rabbits was marginal at the
gross national level, though it probably saved some farmers from bankruptcy during
the leanest years. More importantly, such naïve calculations do not account for the
many other nancial burdens imposed on runholders by a heavy rabbit infestation—
soil erosion, irreversible pasture destruction, poor-quality sheep producing less wool
and fewer lambs, and the huge costs of attempting to manage the rabbits. Rough and
variable though these gures undoubtedly are, they hardly support the government’s
early condence that ferrets would be the salvation of the pastoral industry.117
Long before the end of the nineteenth century, ferrets were well established in the
wild and breeding freely. ey and all other predators of rabbits were still legally
protected until 1903, in the hope they might yet turn the scales against the rabbit
pest, but then an amendment to the Rabbit Nuisance Act 1882 partially removed
that protection.118 Now, ferrets themselves are a declared noxious species, subject
to control campaigns even though ferret numbers are more likely to be determined
by rabbit numbers than by human action, especially in the semi-arid pastoral lands
where they were rst released.119
By 1890, the colonial government had accepted that New Zealand’s rst experiment
in biological control had been a regrettable failure. Later commentators were
more forthright: Herbert Guthrie-Smith120 reported that the strength of local
feeling in Hawke’s Bay against those who introduced rst the rabbits and then the
mustelids could be judged from the resolution passed ‘with ferocious unanimity’
to put abounty of a guinea a head (£1 1s, or about NZ $88 in today’s money)
oneverymustelid caught dead or alive. But he was also a realist: he added sadly that
‘[n]o paper resolutions, however, can stay a plague once introduced; harm of this
sort done cannot be undone’.
116 K. Wodzicki, ‘Interim report on wildlife problems in New Zealand’ (Wellington: Department of Scientic and
Industrial Research, 1947).
117 Anon., ‘Report of the Rabbit Nuisance Committee’ [1880–81], 17.
118 P. Wells, ‘e Fall and Fall in the Legal Status of Mustelids in New Zealand’, Environment and History 15,
no. 3 (2009): 343–68, doi.org/10.3197/096734009X12474738225593.
119 B. K. Clapperton and A. E. Byrom, ‘Feral ferret’, in Handbook of New Zealand Mammals, 2nd ed., ed. C. M.
King (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2005), 294–307.
120 H. Guthrie-Smith, Tutira: e Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station, 4th ed. (Wellington: A. H. & A. W. Reed,
1969), 354.

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Discussion
Many critics at the time and since have blamed the early runholders for altering
the natural environment of the southern pastoral grasslands in favour of rabbits, by
overstocking, repeated burning and creating refuge areas in railway embankments,
sod walls and under rampant gorse hedges, and for the holding by absentee landlords
of huge hill country runs where labour-intensive rabbit control was impossible. In
reassessing this argument, the environmental historian Robert Peden121 pointed
out that uninhabited island ecosystems could be wrecked by rabbits just as well;
Peden and Holland122 reviewed recent evidence that burning did not destroy native
vegetation wholesale; and Holland and Figgins123 emphasised that local variation in
soil and climate strongly modied the impact of rabbit damage.
Arguments about the proper management of leasehold land in the semi-arid, rabbit-
prone high country have continued to the present. anks to the 1997 introduction
of rabbit calicivirus disease, rabbit numbers are at present temporarily reduced,
but they are expected to recover as immunity spreads. As rabbit numbers increase
again, more properties are nding that the costs of rabbit control exceed the income
gained, reviving old arguments about the use of aerial baiting against rabbits with
carrots poisoned with the pesticide 1080.124 Fortunately, in most of the rest of the
country, contemporary habitats are less favourable to rabbits than the semi-arid
lands, and predation upon rabbit populations already inuenced by other factors is
now counted as among the reasons rabbits are no longer the pest they once were.125
But eradication was impossible, and at present it still is.
Why ferrets failed to control rabbits
Biological control can be dened as a direct human manipulation of one species
(an agent or natural enemy) in order to achieve an impact on another species
(a pest). A successful operation of this kind requires certain system conditions,
primarily that predator and prey should have matching population dynamics,
dispersal capabilities and operational areas.126 If these conditions can be met, the
specic characters of the imported agent will determine the details of the outcome.
For example, in1887 Californian citrus orchards were almost ruined by the cottony
121 Peden, Making Sheep Country.
122 R. Peden and P. Holland, ‘Settlers transforming the open country’, in Making a New Land, ed. E. Pawson and
T. Brooking (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2013), 89–105.
123 Holland and Figgins, ‘Environmental disturbance triggering infestations’, 41–79.
124 G. Nugent et al., ‘Why 0.02%? A review of the basis for current practice in aerial 1080 baiting for rabbits
inNew Zealand’, Wildlife Research 39 (2012): 89–103, doi.org/10.1071/WR11121.
125 Norbury and Reddiex, ‘European rabbit’, 131–50.
126 Norbury and Jones, ‘Pests controlling pests: Does predator control lead to greater European rabbit abundance
in Australasia?’, 79–87.

The chronology of a sad historical misjudgement
169
cushion scale insect Icerya purchasi.127 Within a year of the 1888 introduction of
vedalia beetles (ladybirds: Rodolia cardinalis), both species were reduced to small
numbers of individuals playing cat and mouse among the orchards. In that same
year of 1888, stoats and weasels were being imported into New Zealand at the
rate ofmore than 1,000 a year128 and organised breeding of ferrets was producing
ospring for release by the tens of thousands,129 but no such immediate eect on
rabbits was achieved. New Zealand authorities may not have known of the startling
success of ladybirds in California, but even if they did, the biological dierences
between vertebrate and invertebrate predators would have made any hopeful
comparison with their own action quite invalid.
e dierences between ladybirds and ferrets as biological control agents are stark.
Ladybirds can match or exceed the reproductive and dispersal rates of scale insects;
their aerial searching and wide dispersal are rapid and ecient; they can kill without
risk and have few other prey as attractive; scale insects clump together, and have
no defences except high fertility, so every individual found by a ladybird is at risk;
when ladybirds are surrounded by more scale insects than they can eat, they simply
produce more ladybirds, allowing the prey minimum recovery time. Ferrets cannot
match the breeding rate or running speed of rabbits; their underground searching is
comparatively slow and inecient and they disperse slowly on foot; rabbits can hide
in and escape from complex burrow systems, and rapidly reinvade a cleared area;
they are alert and can ght back, so are risky for a ferret to kill compared with other
equally acceptable native prey, including lizards and ightless birds; wild ferrets stop
to eat after killing one grown rabbit or a nest of infants, and resume hunting only
when necessary—the rabbits are left to multiply while the ferrets rest rather than
produce more ferrets.
So, most important, ladybirds and ferrets do not both have the attributes required to
ensure their predatory eects match increases in the target populations. Ladybirds do
this naturally, but ferrets can do it only with local and temporary human assistance,
as Bullen discovered by supplementing ferret populations shortly before and during
the rabbit’s breeding season in spring, and protecting them by prohibiting rabbit
trapping.
e arguments for the wholesale releases of mustelids that impressed the nineteenth-
century colonial government are well preserved and worth careful attention, because
they explain why events unfolded as they did, in the terms and language understood
at the time. e interests and convictions of the players explain much of the story,
127 L. E. Caltagirone and R. L. Doutt, ‘e history of the vedalia beetle importation to California and its impact
on the development of biological control’, Annual Review of Entomology 34 (1989): 1–16, doi.org/10.1146/
annurev.en.34.010189.000245.
128 Statistics of the Colony of New Zealand for the years 1870 to 1899 [Blue Books].
129 Stock Department, ‘e supply of ferrets (contracts made by Stock Department)’.

International Review of Environmental History • Volume 3, Issue 1, 2017
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and so the story itself cannot be fully understood without paying attention to them.
In particular, they explain why the successful early strategy developed by Bullen
was used to justify the later indiscriminate releases by others, who were desperate
enough to ignore the essential conditions Bullen had emphasised. Later experience
amply conrmed that too few ferrets hunting individual rabbits year-round cannot
aect rabbit populations, mainly because ferrets could never remove rabbits faster
than they could be replaced.
No one expressed the unequal odds of the human battle against rabbits better than
the philologist, poet and amateur botanist Arnold Wall, writing in the 1920s:
Where the sheep feed, there feed I, / Depleted lands behind me lie, / Of dogs and
guns I take no heed, / I only breed and breed and breed.
At traps and guns and dogs I smile, / I laugh at cats’ and weasels’ guile, / I frolic,
nibble, frisk and feed, / But all the time I breed and breed.
ey send my skin to clever folks, / who turn me into sealskin cloaks, / A sorely
hunted life I lead, / But still I breed and breed and breed.
When foes attack I cannot bite, / I have no spirit for a ght, / By other methods
Isucceed, / I merely breed and breed and breed.130
Tame versus wicked problems of managing invasive species
e successful establishment and spread of ferrets in New Zealand qualies them
as invasive, that is, an introduced species that is successful in colonising large
areas and reaching high numbers.131 e problems arising from the management
of invasive species are among the prime challenges to conservation authorities
worldwide, which D. J. Woodford et al.132 usefully distinguished as either ‘tame’
or ‘wicked’ problems. ey dened tame problems as those with simple or obvious
solutions, whereas wicked problems are those for which complete solutions are
dicult or impossible to nd, largely because of intense conicts of interest among
the major stakeholders. As an example of a wicked conservation problem, Woodford
et al. analyse the arguments between anglers and conservationists surrounding
themanagement of rainbow trout in New Zealand.
130 A. Wall, ‘A song of Brer Rabbit of Otago’, in Out of Town. Writing from the New Zealand Countryside, ed.
J.Gordon (Christchurch: Shoal Bay Press, 1999), 189. e original poem, rst published in 1922, has three more
verses, the last recommending that nations aiming to attain global leadership should do the same.
131 D. W. Macdonald, C. M. King, and R. Strachan, ‘Introduced species and the line between biodiversity
conservation and naturalistic eugenics’, in Key Topics in Conservation Biology, ed. D. W. Macdonald and K. Service
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 186–205.
132 D. J. Woodford et al., ‘Confronting the wicked problem of managing biological invasions’, NeoBiota
31(2016): 63–86, doi.org/10.3897/neobiota.31.10038.

The chronology of a sad historical misjudgement
171
e tragedy enacted by Bayly and his colleagues in the nineteenth century is that
they saw the long struggle against rabbits as a tame problem: the simple and obvious
solution was to bring in natural enemies, starting with ferrets. e conicting
interests of the time, between wool growers and their opponents summarised above,
made the issue a wicked problem, but it was simply not possible to understand
orsolve it then.
Conclusions
e people whose personal and nancial interests were most aected by the rabbits
were more often the absentee leaseholders of large pastoral runs in the backcountry
rather than the smaller-scale farmers who knew and closely managed their own
land. ese same leaseholders held disproportionate inuence over colonial policy
through their social connections and their majority membership in the Legislative
Council. ey were all strongly in favour of importing the natural enemy of the
rabbit for release on the backcountry, as opposed to the far more expensive and
labour-intensive manual methods of rabbit control that could be eective in more
closely settled districts. In particular, they found that employing professional
rabbiters merely encouraged the sustained harvesting of rabbits. ‘If you want to
breed rabbits keep rabbiters’, said one.133
Chief Inspector Bayly was the public servant with most inuence over anti-rabbit
policy through the 1880s. Bayly pursued his strategy of importing natural enemies
against frequent protests from those who did not agree with his view that the risk
tonative birds was a price worth paying for saving the wool industry.
Serious attempts by private individuals to import ferrets were under way for at least
eight to 10 years before the government actively supported and extended them.
Some, such as Bullen of Kaikoura, showed that under certain conditions ferrets could
have a signicant short-term eect on the numbers of rabbits by landscape-scale
acceleration of juvenile mortality. ese conditions were met when wild populations
of ferrets were supplemented with thousands of locally bred ferrets turned out at the
start of the rabbit breeding season, protected from rabbit trappers, and reinvading
rabbits kept out by fencing. Because Bullen had direct control of his own land, that
is, he did not have to compromise with other stakeholders, his situation was close to
Woodford et al.’s denition of a tame problem. Outside these conditions, where no
such constraints limited the independent actions of multiple players in an intensely
controversial game, the problem of saving the wool industry became intractably
wicked, and indiscriminate mass release of tens of thousands offerrets had no eect
on rabbit numbers.
133 R. Johnson, ‘Report of the Joint Committee on Sheep and Rabbit Acts’, 247.

International Review of Environmental History • Volume 3, Issue 1, 2017
172
Tempting though it may be, it is inappropriate to use twenty-rst-century
knowledge to criticise decisions made by the colonial government. On the contrary,
their experience has illustrated some valuable principles of pest management
applicable today. Ambitious strategies for managing invasive pests (rats, mustelids
and Australianbrushtail possums) are now being developed in New Zealand,134
informed by long experience of past campaigns, including those against rabbits.
Managing pest populations by lethal means (what the ecologist Graeme Caughley135
called ‘frontal assault’) has a long history, and developments in more and better
ways of killing individual pests are advancing rapidly. ese new methods can
prevent short-term damage to threatened species, and are important despite their
drawbacks136 because they can buy us time to nd something better. But pest
populations are determined by the dynamic balance between the numbers input
(fertility, immigration) versus output (mortality, emigration), all of which are locally
and seasonally variable. As Bullen demonstrated so clearly, the most eective lethal
methods are those that are accompanied by some means of reducing fertility in the
remaining pest population. So the task of protecting the most critically threatened
remaining native fauna long-term is a denitely not a tame problem.
e history of rabbits and ferrets in New Zealand is important to understand because
it illustrates the consequences of mistaking a wicked problem for a tame one. A stable
future pest-management policy must depend on interactions between nding new
ways of culling the most pervasive pest populations and managing the reproductive
capability of the remainder, in both cases by using techniques operable at landscape
scale and by socially acceptable means. Finding new ways of increasing mortality,
such as by moving beyond the eective but controversial aerial distribution of 1080
poison,137 and reducing fertility, such as by genetic manipulation of the sex ratio of
ospring,138 are under active investigation. Both will take much longer than simple
damage prevention, because they are part of a wicked problem, whose solution
depends not only on technical expertise but also on widespread social approval and
collaboration, but the will to succeed is there.139 George Bullen would be impressed.
134 B. Owens, ‘Behind New Zealand’s wild plan to purge all pests’, Nature 541 (2017): 148–50, doi.
org/10.1038/541148a; J. C. Russell et al., ‘Predator-Free New Zealand: Conservation Country’, BioScience 65
(2015): 520–5, doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biv012.
135 G. Caughley, Analysis of vertebrate populations (London: John Wiley & Sons, 1977).
136 D. M. Tompkins and C. J. Veltman, ‘Unexpected consequences of vertebrate pest control: Predictions from
a four-species community model’, Ecological Applications 16, no. 3 (2006): 1050–61, doi.org/10.1890/1051-
0761(2006)016[1050:UCOVPC]2.0.CO;2.
137 Nugent et al., ‘Why 0.02%?’, 89–103.
138 Russell et al., ‘Predator-Free New Zealand: Conservation Country’, 520–25.
139 Owens, ‘e Big Cull’, 148–50.

The chronology of a sad historical misjudgement
173
Acknowledgements
is project would have been impossible without the help of many people, especially
Ken Ayers, who did much of the early archival searching both in New Zealand and in
the UK. Librarians: Judith Holloway (Hocken Collections, Dunedin), Cheryl Ward
(Waikato University), Emma Knowles (Toitū Otago Settlers Museum, Dunedin),
Keith Giles (Auckland Central City Library), Rachael Gardner and Marion Lowman
(Bodleian Library, Oxford) and sta at Cambridge University Library and the library
of the Zoological Society of London. Archivists: Chris Meech (Waitaki District
Archive), Katherine C’Ailceta, Donal Raethel (Archives New Zealand, Wellington),
Kas McEntyre (Alexandra), Rebecca Smith, Sonya Johnson (Invercargill), Anne
Maguire (Arrowtown), Fiona Passi (Auckland), many sta at the National Archives
(Kew), National Maritime Museum (Greenwich), Berkshire Record Oce and
Museum of English Rural Life (both Reading). Information: Ken Ayers, Dawn
Coburn, Peter Holland, Frank Leckie, Rachel Letofsky, Fay McDonald, Tessa Mills
and Evan Tosh. Graphics: Max Oulton and Conrad Pilditch. Hospitality: Daphne
and Bill Lee (Dunedin), Anne Sudell, Je and Kate Booth (Wellington), Wolfson
College (Cambridge) and Lauren Harrington (Oxford). Funding: University of
Waikato RTCF Grant 2016/104615. Helpful comments on early drafts: Ken Ayers,
James Beattie, Tony Beauchamp, Tom Brooking, Peter Holland, Grant Norbury,
Roger Pech and Evan Tosh.

is text is taken from International Review of Environmental History,
Volume 3, Issue 1, 2017, edited by James Beattie, published 2017 by ANUPress,
e Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.