If there’s one thing that unites pretty much all New Zealanders, it’s a love of killing animals.
“On our island anything with fur is an invading species. Unless it’s a bat”.
When I was at school in England, about 25 years ago, we had a class debate on whether fox hunting should be banned. I chose to defend fox hunting because nobody else would, and at the end of the class there was a secret vote in which even I voted in for the ban (well, you can’t vote for your own team can you).
But in New Zealand, hunting is not a right. It’s a duty. The ethics of hunting are not even on the table.
“Unlike most other developed countries with a hunting tradition, there are no bag-limits or seasons for hunting large game in New Zealand. Hunting in national parks is a permitted activity. The wide variety of game animals and the limited restrictions means hunting is a popular pastime which has resulted in a high level of firearms ownership among civilians”.
I won’t subject you, dear reader, to a lengthy monologue on ethics, but I will state my position briefly: I see no moral distinction between eating an animal killed by myself or by somebody else, and the animals I shot were at least living an authentic feral life until that life came to an abrupt and mostly painless end.
But is it ethical to eat animals in the first place when there are so many alternatives? Well, if you believe in Darwinian evolution (and if you don’t, well, please just go away) then these creatures are really our own poor and stupid relatives. Breeding them only to then kill and eat them is morally indefensible (and with that I spoil my case) but they’re so damned delicious I put up with the cognitive dissonance.
Hunting is part of the NZ experience, I reasoned, so I put out some feelers and the Oncology Ward Manager Cynthia made a suggestion.
Here she is after accepting a job in the community, and therefore never has to work with the chemotherapy nurses ever again.
Cynthia’s neighbour Bruce is a farmer and he regularly shoots feral goats on his property. If I rent his bach (Kiwi for holiday home) then I could go goat shooting with him while I was there.
For any hunters who might be reading, I acknowledge that shooting goats on a farm isn’t exactly hunting. But they’re good in a curry, and since I didn’t have much time left in NZ I booked the bach/ shooting trip.
“Hi Bruce. This is Edd. I’ve never fired a rifle or shot an animal before. Can we have a practice before we go hunting?”
Can you see the target?
2 bullets later
Training day over, we went possum hunting. New Zealanders feel towards Possums the way most English people feel towards rats. “They’re an invading species, they destroy bird-life, they eat our fruit and the price of their pelts has fallen so they’re not even good for that anymore”. Bruce told me that visitors from Auckland who rent his bach solely to go hunting will regularly shoot 70 possums in a night and just leave them all on the ground. Bruce doesn’t really approve of this. He prefers renting the bach to Chinese tourists. At least they eat what they shoot. I’d never seen a possum before, except laid out on the road, and I thought they were quite cute actually. It isn’t their fault they don’t have any natural predators. Once it was dark we went out on the farm buggy with Bruce and his son Ryan who was our “spotter”. When we came across a possum, Ryan would shine the torch on it and it would climb to what it thought was the safest part of the tree. The very top. Then it would hold completely still, gazing back at the torch, it’s eyes twinkling. This proved to be a poor defense strategy.
Possum supper
I haven’t met any New Zealanders who eat possum, considering them vermin, but they’re actually rather tasty. A cross between chicken (inevitably) and pheasant. And eating him made me feel slightly better about having slain him, when he’d done me absolutely no harm whatsoever, and was just going about his possum business.
This is a delightful film. An orphaned child is raised by a Buddhist monk. He’s a fairly good natured boy, but like most children he’s also cruel. One day the monk sees the boy, now about 6 years old, tie a little stone to the leg of a frog and then watch it go hopping off lopsidedly. Unaware he is being watched, the boy continues his play, and goes on to tie a little pebble to live fish, and also a snake. That evening, while the boy is sleeping, the monk ties a large rock to the boy’s back, and knots it in such a way that the can’t take it off without assistance.
Next morning, the boy wakes up:
Boy – Hey! Why have you done this? This isn’t fair!
Monk – Was it fair when you tied stones to those animals yesterday? Go and find every one of those animals and untie them. And if any of them have died, then you will carry that stone in your heart forever.
Weighed down by the boulder, the boy begins searching the forest for his victims. Eventually he finds the frog, still hopping in circles, and releases it. And he finds the fish and frees it. But when he finds the snake, the snake has died.
Back to the blood sports. The following day Benedict came to join us. He’s a vegetarian, but he is leaving NZ soon as well, and also felt that shooting animals was something he needed to do first. Bruce drove us around on a tour of the farm. We fed some calves, checked out an old hill fort where Bruce had found his lucky stone axe, and finally we came upon some goats.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xGCYNv5YjGrppGLWOUREtO_27DqGAmUO/view?usp=sharing
The ensuing battle had all the glory you might expect. It didn’t real feel like sport, but I can assure you at least it was over very quickly. After a little rough surgery using my penknife (thank you Simon) we took the delicious meat and fled the scene of the crime.
Dee-licious.
Edd Whewell: the New Zealand years 