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Dave Hansford wrote a book about the pest poison 1080 because “someone had to”.
“I’d grown tired of seeing the volume and the extremity and the sheer amounts of BS in circulation about 1080,” he says.
The result is a 318-page book called Protecting Paradise: 1080 and the Fight to Save New Zealand’s Wildlife that dissects anti-1080 sentiment and answers sentence by sentence virtually every anti claim ever made about the pesticide.
Poisoning pests with 1080 is a lot like climate change, vaccines and fluoridating water – the science looks convincing and to many the evidence is overwhelming.
But for a few, the science isn’t convincing let alone overwhelming. For some of these folks, the science is WRONG, it’s FAKE, it’s a CONSPIRACY.
These are the people that Nelson-based Hansford battles.
He is not a scientist, but he champions the scientists.
ansford is the guy who goes down the rabbit holes to ferret out every anti-1080 claim and conspiracy theory.
He wanted to write a “considered, objective appraisal of the science of 1080, trying to tease apart the mythology and propaganda from the facts”.
Someone had to.
It must have been exhausting work and Hansford admits to many late nights on Facebook, home ground for many anti-1080 activists.
He understands he’ll never convince the vehement deniers, that 10 per cent of the population who reject 1080 utterly.
He’s after the waverers, the folks who’ve seen the work of 1080 opponents and don’t know what to believe.
Here is a good point to recap the 1080 issue. The scientific consensus is that 1080 is a necessary evil until something better comes along.
There is nothing better at the moment for poisoning possums, rats and stoats, which would otherwise kill native birds, insects, plants and trees.
If we didn’t use 1080, there’s a good chance treasured native species would become extinct.
Finding something better has now been centralised and partially funded under the Predator Free 2050 campaign.
If this works, then 1080 use will stop eventually. Continue reading
Sources
- The Press / Stuff, article by Will Harvie
- Image: Taranaki Daily News
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