Possum

Nocturnal pestilence, thy name is possum.  

NO - DO NOT think Awww Cute😤 (borrowed image)

Most New Zealanders have probably never seen a live possum despite the population of the wee beasties on these isles (estimated at 30 million, down from around 70 million in the 1980s).  They will however have seen possums squashed on roads all over the country. 

Dazzled. Frozen in the headlights. The population of possums is getting smarter; the stupid ones are getting eliminated.

My grandmother, a grower of prize winning roses, hated possums with a passion. Possums love the taste of young rose shoots - passionately.

Grandma had a cage trap, but hate the rose vandals as ahe did, she still had to call on someone else to despatch the stupid ones that fell for the bait. (not my Grandma)

Traps are getting smarter too; and considerably more expensive, but they are of such clever design these days that they despatch the possum, drop it on the ground and reset themselves. (Possums climb trees so trees are the best place to trap them.)

Possums also climb power poles and electrocute themselves taking out power to whole neighbourhoods. To prevent this power poles all have wide smooth metal belts as anti-climb devices to protect stupid possums from themselves, and spare the human population from having to make toast over open fires.

Maybe the metal belt on a few poles could be replaced by clever traps. Self-resetting traps rely on possums being so stupid they are climbing over a pile of dead kin to see what all the fuss is about.

Gradually the stupid ones will be weeded out and we will have a race of super possums. Then we will put up signs offering them free one-way flights to Australia - from whence their forebears came curtesy of some misguided plonker who thought NZ needed a fur trade. Like these islands also needed carriers of bovine Tuberculosis, and predators that eat the eggs and chicks of native birds that evolved without mammalian predators.

Scully caught a possum on our early evening walk a couple of days ago; a stupid one that ventured out, on the ground, near a track, in daylight.

borrowed image

Scully dragged it out onto the road and deposited it near my feet. Whereupon the possum turned and froze in fighter stance and Scully danced around barking at it. I had no means of despatching it efficiently (not sure if I could anyway - moral dilemma, I should but could I? Why expect others to do what I can't?) so I just stood there like a stupid possum. Three times it ran into the bush and 3 times Scully dragged it back until I figured this was going nowhere useful and called her off. The possum scuttled into a manuka bush and could be heard screaming obscenities as we continued up the road.

Not so cute now huh? (borrowed image)

Now I'm wondering if I should carry a pick handle on our walks. I risk someone thinking I intend to use it on a certain German Shepherd.  I think I'd rather invest in some expensive clever traps and let some other agency by responsible for end of life in furry nocturnal pestilence around here.

NB - for reference possums are about the same size (similar mass, different distribution) as Scully and armed with pointy teeth and vicious claws.  I asked Bro if his terriers could despatch a possum and he thought that working together they might but they'd probably get injured in the process. Being terriers they wouldn't give up willingly (and neither did Scully).  They certainly couldn't shake it to death the way they do rats.