Its easy to see why your ideas have been rubbished by so many experts and fellow people in the industry marty.

far too biased to even be considered slightly credible,  its a pity as reading through alot of stuff youve written over the years and theres some bloody good stuff in there but your tunnel vision and borderline lunatic stance on 1080 let you down.

Huntnfish are you marty foote under a 2nd username? Or just his best buddie?   I have no problem with wanting to hold a govt department to account and definatly no problem if he got 1080 use stopped or significantly reduced (im neither anti or pro but I do think it could be done a better way)  its just the way he undertakes it that ruins it,  he cherry picks info just as much as he claims doc does and have yet to read an unbiased view written by him.  change those 2 things and credibility will start to grow, and mayby not try ram it relentlessly down our throats as many already have a hard time swallowing it.

gonehuntin wrote on Jul 15^th, 2018 at 7:19am:


My comments are only rubbished in public as DOC's policy is to shut down all dissenting views.

When I talk directly with the DOC experts they agree with me that there are problems with 1080 and they want the opportunity to use more ground based wild animal control.

DOC's top bird scientist, Graeme Elliot, has even written that DOC needs to change from activity planning to project planning. My understanding is "activity planning" is doing stuff (dropping 1080 to kill rats and possums) and "project planning" is looking out over the long term, at everything that is happening, and looking at all options for achieving a satisfactory long term result.

DOC's best and brightest are leaving to work on better projects where they can use their expertise to achieve the sort of results that DOC used to achieve.

Some of the experts, you are talking about, are scared of speaking out with what they believe to be true and some of them have absolutely no moral compass and are willing to accept the rewards offered to promote dubious and false statements.

Your ability to read what you want to read is outstanding.

Huntnfish .. that is a real ugly post.

gonehuntin wrote on Jul 19^th, 2018 at 5:49am:


A good and mature response.

huntnfish wrote on Jul 18^th, 2018 at 5:38am:


gonehuntin...I can assure you that myself and huntnfish are two individual people. we meet and talk so if we are the same person I must be totally mad and insane...A hypothesis that many of my detractors might want to agree with and some have even tried to unsuccessfully promote.

To put things in perspective, I am not anti-1080, I am pro trapping and the pro-1080 people have labelled me as anti-1080 because I have proven that trappers can do a better, more cost effective job than any poison can do.

I fully understand that the numbers of experienced trappers couldn't even replace 10-15% of the area that aerial 1080 is currently doing without contracts being let and new blood being trained. What I am asking for is that the aerial 1080 areas be opened up to open, fair and transparently tendered competitive tenders with the successful contractors only being paid after they have achieved the stated output targets.

The idea of open, fair and transparently tendered contracts is a really simple idea and concept. I have no idea why people like you will continually try to make things more complicated by stating that such a simple concept is not possible because politicians, along with their paid scientists, say that it is more complicated, to the extent that it is not possible to even consider the possibility that open, fair and transparently tendered competitive tenders might deliver a better result than the government controlled staus-quo.

gonehuntin wrote on Aug 8^th, 2018 at 9:51am:



Although my experience is with possums, I have spoken to the successful rat trappers and I believe that I can use my skills on targeting other animals as well as possums. In fact, many of the animals can be targeted at the same time as possums, using the same traps set for possums.

I believe that trappers can do a better, more cost effective job than 1080 within the 1080 budgets that are currently being spent. We have to surmise about the real cost of aerial 1080 as DOC and OSPRI refuse to release any individual 1080 operational budgets, citing commercial sensitivity as the reason for keeping the budgets out of the public view. We know that DOC and OSPRI start quoting 1080 at around $16/ha and, when pushed, they will lift this price to above $30/ha, AHB, in the 2010 cost review, wrote that aerial 1080 was costing $45+/ha and when individual 1080 operational components were added up the figure was very close to $60/ha. I have received an internal DOC budget for an aerial 1080 operation that has $60/ha as the quoted price. Prior to the Hunua 1080 operation, the Auckland Council staff produced a budget, of $17-18/ha, for approval by the Council, after the operation the cost expenditure quoted was over $34/ha, when asked why the price had doubled, from the pre-operation budget to what was spent, the response was that Auckland Council staff had no experience in using 1080 and had relied on advice from Environment Waikato and DOC to formulate the pre-operation budget and the advice received was wrong. None of these costings include all the costs of aerial 1080 with many expenditure components being a part of the DOC/OSPRI/Regional Council general expenditure and are never quantified.

Aerial 1080 and trapping are two totally different ways of going about achieving the same result and need to be looked at differently when long term planning is being done. Aerial 1080 is a series of one-off operations that take place 3-5 times in a 10 year period. Trapping is a continuous process that has phases. The first phase being the initial knock-down followed on by the maintenance phase, which is set up and established during the first phase.

In both methods, the 10-20 year planning time frame, currently being used by DOC and OSPRI, is essential for effective control. From a contractors point of view, the 1080 contractors need a long term guarantee of work to justify the expense of investing in expensive infrastructure and, from a trappers perspective, the longer the term of the contract the greater the incentive to lower the animal numbers to very low densities in the first year.

What is happening is that, although the 1080 contractors can rely on work over a 10 year period, the publicly promoted line is that all wild animal control is short term one-off contracts with the trappers being offered contract terms of between 3-12 months. This is highly inefficient and does not put the trappers skills to the best use. As an example, if the target is 5%RTC, the short term contractor will target 5%, on a 10 year contract the trapper will target 0%RTC, in the first year, knowing that the better the job done, in the first year, the less work will need to be done in the remaining 9 years. The trapping methods are different too, with leg-holds being used in the first phase and kill traps being used in the second phase. There are contracts that have succeeded in getting down to <1%, using leg-holds, and then maintaining <1% by the use of kill traps that are being checked 3-4 times per year.

Rats are different in that there needs to be a base-line continuous trapping pressure applied with added trapping intensity when there are unusual rat eruptions. The work has been done to prove that effective rat control can be achieved through the use of traps. The key to making rat trapping more effective, in the future, is to start collecting tree flowering quantities, success of pollination, predicted seed-fall and actual seed-fall as this information will provide a pattern that trappers can use to predict rat eruptions and alter their trapping programmes to compensate.

Cats, ferrets and hedghogs can be targeted at the same time as possums when leg-holds are being used. Kill traps can be used after the leg-holds have been removed.

Stoats can be trapped in the rat specific trap-sets and can also be targeted with stoat specific trap-sets.

Wasps are now considered to be a major predator of insects and bird chicks and the new wasp control system can be easily and cheaply deployed by the trappers as they go about their activities.

The key difference is that trapping can apply continuous pressure and maintain a consistent population density, while 1080 can only achieve a one-off reduction and then the population rises until the next 1080 application, which can cause a boom-bust situation, in rats, that maybe as damaging as doing nothing unless 1080 is applied, more often, to compensate.

While the focus is tying trappers to short term contracts and guaranteeing 1080 contractors work over the long term, there can never be competitive tendering as the system has been designed to make trappers inefficient and provide long term financial security for the 1080 contractors. This situation is further complicated by trappers performance being the best under output contracts (paid on results) and 1080 contractors only being prepared to sign input contracts (paid on work completed regardless of the results).

These issues have been canvassed between DOC and trappers, with the memorable DOC statement, made last year, being "DOC has no appetite for change" to which my response was "Well, we will just have work to increase DOC's appetite". DOC has accepted that change could happen and there are good reasons for making the change, with the change needing the will change and that has to come from the people who are making the decisions who are the elected politicians. There is a will for change in the Conservancies and this will is being overridden by instructions from Wellington.