Colonel Boscawen, of Auckland, who is a most reliable authority, tells me that as long as there is plenty of green stuff available opossums do not interfere with fruit, but that the damage they are often charged with is the work of rats--presumably black rats. On the other hand, at Kawau, Motutapu, Hawera, and other places they are stated to be destructive in orchards, eating the shoots of apple and plum trees in the spring-time and the fruit in the autumn.
The number of opossums in this country now is enormous. In 1912 it was estimated that over sixty thousand skins were taken in the Catlin’s district alone. Some acclimatization societies try to protect these animals, while fruitgrowers seek to destroy them. The law is rather complex on the subject, and few laymen know whether or not it is legal to destroy them. Meanwhile a large number are killed annually; but their skins are often declared as rabbit-skins, though, as a matter of fact, they are worth four or five times as much.
Most people think they know all about pigs, and hardly associate them with wild life in New Zealand. They usually consider them the dirtiest creatures on earth, and yet, with remarkable inconsistency, they eat ham and bacon without inquiring too particularly how the animals producing them were reared or fed. The pig is naturally one of the cleanest animals and most particular feeders known, and it is only the filthy way in which most people keep them which is responsible for their popular reputation.
Pigs are the commonest of the larger mammals which have become feral in New Zealand, and are the most widespread. They are plentiful in wild bush country from the North Cape to the Bluff, and have also gone wild in the Chatham and Auckland Islands. I hope to be able to tell the majority of my readers some facts about these much-maligned animals which they did not know before.
Pigs (_Sus scrofa_) belong to the section of Ungulates known as the Artiodactyla, or even-toed. They walk on their third and fourth toes, which are the only ones to reach the ground; those on each side, which are much smaller and higher up, are the second and fifth digits; there is no trace of the first. Pigs are distinguished by several characters, of which the most outstanding are the bristly skin, the flexible snout tipped by a fleshy disk within which the nostrils open, the numerous teeth and tusk-like canines, while the teats extend along the underside of the body. They possess a single stomach, and are consequently non-ruminating animals. Pigs increase at a great rate, for they commence to bear young when about a year old, and bring forth several at a birth. Domestic pigs produce twelve, or even more, at a time; but wild pigs seldom have more than six or seven.