Time to knock use of 1080 on its head: Charles Wooley

It’s time we sought a humane alternative method to the 1080 poison whereby native wildlife can reasonably coexist with farms and golf courses writes Charles Wooley.

Sodium fluoroacetate, better known as 1080, is a nasty and inhumane agricultural poison. It has been banned in most parts of the world but disgraceful exceptions are Australia and New Zealand, where it is still used to kill native animals.

It is odourless, colourless and tasteless and its victims die slowly and in agony. Most suffer unseen in the bush so the symptoms have been best described in pet dogs which have picked up a 1080 bait or might have browsed on the carcass of a poisoned native animal.

Symptoms include vomiting, disorientation and shaking which leads to agonised howling and frenzied behaviour and dying can take 48 hours.

It is an appalling and cruel death which you wouldn’t even wish on the people who make the stuff.

In the eighties a well-known Tasmanian forestry scientist, Dr Frank Podger (long gathered to the great woodchipper in the sky) accompanied me on a filming expedition into some deep

old-growth forest west of Maydena.

A sign attached to a tree indicating 1080 poison has been laid near Tewkesbury, inland from Burnie in Tasmania's North-West

It was the usual Tasmanian story of conflicted emotions. The awe and enchantment experienced wandering the mossy and ferny floor and craning up to see the massive trunks of some of the biggest trees on earth, was soon grimly counterbalanced by the Hiroshima landscape of a clear-felled coup just a few kilometres away.

But the Doc was able to put a positive spin on that scene of apocalyptic devastation.

“We will re-seed this cleared ground with eucalypts and within a few years a healthy young forest will be growing here,” he said. But then he bemused me by announcing, “Everything will be fine just as long as we can keep the vermin off the new seedlings.”

“Vermin, Doc? Do you mean there are rats and mice out here?”

“No Charles, I mean vermin, like wallabies, potoroos and possums,” said Frank who was in all other ways really a nice and kindly bloke.

That is still the ideology. They are not native Tasmanian animals, they are ‘vermin’ and so decades later the mindless brutality goes on and some good people still condone it.

This week the Mercury revealed that over the past year 28 ‘crop protection permits’ were issued for the use of 1080 in Tasmania.

None were for forestry operators.

MERCURY TASMANIA, EDITORIAL CARTOON, BY CHRIS DOWNES.

More than a decade ago there was such a public outcry against the use of the poison, the now defunct and disgraced Gunn’s Ltd stopped using it.

Soon after, the government banned 1080 but it is back in use again though last year only certain farmers and golf clubs continue the barbaric and cruel practice. I don’t know who

they are but if they write in to complain I will let you know.

But perhaps we shouldn’t blame the users. We should blame the pushers hiding behind an awkward and obscure title (don’t they always) DPIPWE. The Department of Primary

Industries, Parks, Water and Environment (they don’t mention Poison) is the importer and distributer of 1080.

I doubt either the Minister or his authorising clerks have taken the time to watch a 1080 poisoned animal die. (You’d need to be a monster to do that).

Nor might they ever have had a hand in laying the baits. (Too dangerous)

Remote, indifferent and sublimely ignorant they merely buy the stuff and pass it on.

All the 1080 in the world comes from a small American factory in Alabama where the Tull Chemical Company produce about five tonnes annually, mostly for Australia and New Zealand. There is otherwise no global demand.

The use and production of 1080 is severely restricted in the US for fear terrorists might get hold of it. A few of teaspoons of the stuff could kill scores of people.

The product was developed as a rat poison in Germany in 1940. The Nazis considered using it in the death camps but decided it was too dangerous for their guards to handle.

Animal Liberation activists protest against the Sprit of Tasmania's use of the poison 1080.

In the pleasant little Alabama town of Oxford, the Tull Chemical Co’s tiny factory remains unpopular with its neighbours who know and fear what is made there.

The State has compelled the company to build high wire-mesh fences and to beef-up its internal security measures.

The good news is with pressure from US environmentalists, concerns from the Department of Homeland Security, and such a small market, the long-term production of 1080 is by no means guaranteed.

The plant shut down once in the mid-1980s. Before it does so again, Tasmania should find a humane alternative method whereby native wildlife can reasonably coexist with farms

and golf courses.

Tasmanian Tiger sighting 1080 poison treated carrots near the site of the 1982 tiger sighting on Salmon River Road, south of Togari.

Failing that, any university chemistry student with access to a laboratory and the internet could knock up sodium fluoroacetate. Maybe Tasmania could build its own production plant, poison the travel bubble and flog the stuff to the Kiwis.

But given the Tull factory’s unpopularity in Alabama where in our nation’s Deep South should we put it?

I suggest the north of Tasmania. Over the past five years 147 permits for 1080 use were handed out up north and only two in the south.

Practically, the plant should be sited near where the product is used most, and politically, where the government will suffer the least damage. I understand the government has few friends to lose in the pleasant northern rural hamlet of Westbury.

And then DPIPWE could become straight and upfront with us by adding yet one more defining letter to its messy acronym and become DPIPWEP: Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water, Environment and Poison.