1080 facts

The Timaru Herald editorial:

Taranaki protest organiser Kevin Moratti claimed that, “if 1080 inadvertently got in our water catchment off the mountain – by inadvertently I mean a bucket being dropped or something – New Plymouth would be without water for three months. This is the toxicity of this stuff.”

Quite aside from the problem of an entire pest-control strategy being predicated on the possibility of a preventable mistake, the clear evidence that 1080 is that toxic is lacking. Warnings without clear evidence amount to not much more than scaremongering. …

Discussing the alleged toxicity of 1080, the report said more than 2500 samples over 20 years had been taken from drinking water supplies, streams and lakes after aerial drops. “In all this time, 1080 residues have never been detected in drinking water supplies, and only found in vanishingly small and harmless levels in 3 per cent of the remaining samples.”

As more than one 1080 defender has said since the weekend, the concentrations of its toxic ingredient, monofluoroacetate, are significantly higher in tea than the maximum concentration allowed under New Zealand’s drinking water standards.

Many many things are toxic at a high concentration but perfectly safe at the levels we encounter them. To drink a fatal dose, you would need to consumer 60,000 litres of water in one sitting.

And the alternative to 1080, trapping, is massively expensive.It costs 20 times more than 1080 drops. Doing trapping instead of 1080 in all our national parks would costs over $2 billion a year.