Joe Bennett: The possums are taking over again

The possums are clever and soon learn how to defeat the trap Photo / Getty Images

Opinion

So, do I get a gun?

I've never owned a gun. My elder brother, now dead of the drink, took me rabbit shooting once when I was a kid. As we got out of the Landrover there was a fat rabbit on the track ahead. My brother handed me a loaded shotgun. I leant against the bonnet of the car.

I still recall the sense of power. I knew what the rabbit did not, which was that it was about to die. I already owned its life. I sensed then how that feeling could intoxicate. I fired and missed. The rabbit just lolloped away. I found I didn't mind at all.

Once in the depth of winter we went pigeon shooting at dawn. It was good to tramp the fields, the frozen plough soil crumbling underfoot, but we saw no pigeons. As we returned to the car without firing a shot I took aim at a songbird, a chaffinch. It was something to do. I had no thought of hitting it. I hit it. It tumbled from the branch. I retrieved the little corpse from the undergrowth and felt the softness of its belly feathers in my palm. It remains the only animate thing I've ever shot.

Guns are unfair. You kill at such distance. You kill without engaging. You do not have to grapple with the victim. You don't smell their breath, feel their will to live. You take a life without giving a chance.

But in the natural world there's no obligation to be fair. Any predator that had a gun would use it.

Since the earthquakes my only neighbours have been evicted, their houses razed. So I live now on the frontier at the end of the road, with Lyttelton at my back and the wild world in front of me, the world where stuff lives and dies unregulated, the world that recognises no private property, the world where the only truth is survival.

Every night the possums swarm over my place. In the autumn they ate all my fruit. Though I netted my best apple tree they scoffed at my efforts. With their little hands they reached in and round and through, and they had all the unhurried night to do it. They eat my geraniums, the shoots on my roses.

I bought a trap with fierce springs and a kill bar. It killed perhaps a dozen possums and I laid them out high on the hill for the hawks.

But the corpses stopped coming. I'd get up in the morning to find the trap sprung, the bait gone. I stayed up one night and watched a possum climb on top of the trap and bat it with its paws until the mechanism fired. Then the beast reached in to take the bait.

This spring the possums have multiplied. A friend who works in conservation got me a new and better trap. Four mornings last week I woke to a corpse. But at the weekend and each day since I've woken to a sprung trap. The beasts have worked it out again.

So now I have choices. I could cave to the possums, let them roam unchallenged, let them eat what they want. They are, after all, an inconvenience rather than a threat, and I can afford to buy fruit from the supermarket.

Besides, what right have I to kill them? The answer, of course, is no right but the oldest one, the right of might.

I could persist with trapping, buying new devices, replacing them when the beasts have mastered them. But it would be a business of shrinking returns and growing outlay, and it would never put enough of a dent in the population.

I could poison them but I do not like to. Death by trap is more or less instantaneous. Death by poison is slow and cruel. Nature may have no compunction about cruelty but we do and should exercise it.

Which leaves shooting. I am told that there are air guns now of sufficient power to kill a possum and for which you do not need a licence. But I suspect the way to go would be a proper gun, a gun with gunpowder and bullets, for which I'd need a licence, and a safe, and a better aim than I suspect I have.

But then I go back fifty years and lean once more against the bonnet of a Landrover and feel again the power of life and death in a single squeezing finger, and then there seems a whole lot more to getting a gun than simply getting a gun.