In a tiny school on the southern tip of New Zealand, children are lining up their kill.
Big brown rats with long tails, their stomachs caked in blood. Smaller rats, stiff from the refrigerator, tails in a tangle.
The children happily pass the rodents around with bare hands, proud of last night’s catch — and fixed on the goal of eradicating rodents from the surrounding forests.
Photo: AFP / NEW ZEALAND`S DEPARTMENT OF CONSERVATION / JAKE OSBORNE
The small island school at Halfmoon Bay on Rakiura Island has unleashed its students upon the local rodent population, running a competition encouraging children to catch and kill hundreds of rats in an effort to preserve the island’s bird population.
Forty students caught more than 600 rats over the 100-day challenge, including a five-year-old, who killed 60 rats.
In TVNZ footage, captured in the midst of the competition, the children dump bucketloads of rats on the school lawn, arrange them according to size and dangle particularly impressive specimens by the tails for measuring.
Each child was given a trap made out of recycled political billboards.
“My trap, basically the whole thing’s a layer of blood,” one enthusiastic vermin-slayer said.
“Even the five-year-olds are really into the idea. They know the end goal. They want kiwis back in their back yards,” said Emma Jenkinson, chair of the school’s board of trustees, who helped organize the competition.
The children’s efforts are part of one of the world’s most ambitious pest-eradication plans: New Zealand’s national goal of being predator-free by 2050.
The children say they’re dedicated to trying to rid the islands of rats so that native birds can thrive.
“We went for a walk once and saw more rats than birds, just in trees, going up trees to probably get to birds nests and eat their eggs and stuff,” said Bella McRitchie-King, the competition’s winner.
Rats are considered a dangerous pest in New Zealand, and a major threat to native wildlife. Because most of New Zealand’s birds evolved without mammalian predators, they tend to be highly vulnerable to rats, stoats, cats and other mammals introduced by humans.
Many lay their eggs on the ground where they’re vulnerable to being eaten, and some, such as the flightless kiwi, are easy prey for ground-based hunters.
The country is on a mission to eradicate uncontrolled predators, to enable bird species to recover.
Much of that work has been concentrated on the country’s small islands, where the sea border bolsters their chances of eradicating predators completely.
With their dead vermin, the children competed for a series of prizes, including for most rats caught — awarded to 11-year-old Bella, who caught 64.
The school also gave out awards for most aesthetically pleasing rat fur coat, the rat with the strangest tail, biggest teeth and largest rat.
Jenkinson said the children were highly involved in conservation activities, so were not squeamish about their rat-trapping endeavors.
“It’s no biggie for them to be doing rat trapping. But to have prizes on offer really boosted the stakes,” she said.
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