Independent scientific reviews

and official documents on 1080

NZ’s ecosystems have been coping with rats for centuries and predators for many decades

1984	King, C.	Oxford University Press	Immigrant Killers. Introduced Predators and the conservation of birds in New Zealand	“wherever the memory of the destruction of the last remnants of the original native fauna is still so fresh, the common loathing of the introduced predators is likely to be particularly strong. But that feeling should not influence the policy. The way we think about the problems of our world today, and the solutions we try, are determined more than we may realize by these deep-seated attitudes. They are dangerous precisely because they are so seldom hauled out into the daylight of reason and made to account for themselves. It is easy to blame the introduced predators for many of the past extinctions, but not very useful if it leads us to forget the other environmental changes that man has brought about, or to attempt to manage the remaining native species with inappropriate techniques. Rational management policies for the contemporary world must be based on more than an instinctive human condemnation of all animals that live by reddened teeth and claws.”
1984	King, C.	Oxford University Press	Immigrant Killers. Introduced Predators and the conservation of birds in New Zealand	“As the prey decline and searching time increases, there will come a time when the stoats are not making a sufficient net energy gain each day. Then they must emigrate or die, although there may still be prey surviving, at very low density, which can breed up again as soon as the stoats have gone. This is the reason that natural predators can seldom exterminate their prey, except when they have the advantage of surprise attack upon unprepared and defenceless species unused to being hunted.”
1984	King, C.	Oxford University Press	Immigrant Killers. Introduced Predators and the conservation of birds in New Zealand	“The hardy species are the ones that have survived on the main islands for at least a hundred years in company with the whole range of predators and other habitat changes, and therefore are able to come to some sort of terms with them. The management policy appropriate for them is that of conservation, defined in a recent, thought-provoking textbook as denoting ‘programmes for the long-term retention of natural communities under conditions which provide the potential for continuing evolution’. What conditions do they require? Simply to be left alone in their natural habitat, and enough of it. In the long run, the continued survival of any species genotype is impossible outside the habitat to which it is adapted: conservation of species and of habitat are the same thing.”
1984	King, C.	Oxford University Press	Immigrant Killers. Introduced Predators and the conservation of birds in New Zealand	“stories incline one to favour Atkinson’s suggestion that the rather late spread of ship rats through the main islands of New Zealand may account for the final disappearance of many bird species which had been able to hang on until then. This may be either because ship rats are more effective predators than the other two species, or because the effects they had were additional to any which the other two species had already exerted. Nowadays, mainland ship rats seldom eat birds, ⁵⁰ but that is probably because few species remain on the mainland which are still vulnerable to rats.”
2015	Urlich, S.C.	NZ J Ecol. 39: 133-142	What’s the end-game for biodiversity: is it time for conservation evolution?	“The goal is the eventual colonisation of unmanaged sinks by increasingly predator-savvy forest birds leading to self-sustaining populations in the forest landscape.