CHAPTER VIII.

CARNIVORA--CATS AND DOGS.

Five species of carnivorous animals (exclusive of menagerie specimens) have been introduced into New Zealand. Cats and dogs are domestic animals of which numerous individuals have gone wild from time to time; while ferrets, stoats, and weasels have been liberated and are now common.

One of the most characteristic features of the land carnivora is “the looseness of their skin, which, instead of being stretched on the body as tightly as a drum-parchment, as it is in grass-eaters--for instance, the ox or hippopotamus--is quite ‘baggy,’ having between it and the flesh of the beast a layer of the loosest possible fibres. It is for this reason that the skin of any but a very fat dog can be pinched up so readily, while of an herbivore it may be said, in the words of eulogy uttered by Mr. Squeers of his son Wackford, ‘Here’s firmness, here’s solidness! Why, you can hardly get up enough of him between your fingers and thumb to pinch him anywheres.’” As Parker says, “The use of this loose skin will be very evident to any one who will take the trouble to watch the great cats playing together at the Zoological Gardens. They are continually scratching one another, but the loose skin is dragged round by the claws, which in consequence can get no hold and do no harm; with a tight skin, on the other hand, the slightest scratch of such a claw as a tiger’s would cause a serious wound. The looseness of the skin is very evident in the puma and jaguar, in which it hangs in a fold along the middle of the belly, like a great dewlap.”

The skull is very strongly developed, and has great bony ridges for the attachment of the jaw-muscles. In herbivorous animals the brain-case is small and the face much prolonged; but in carnivores--especially cats--the face is very short relatively to the cranial portion of the skull. The higher carnivora cannot chew or grind their food; they only tear it and mince it. Cats and dogs walk on the toes, the under-surfaces of which are covered with soft leathery pads, so as to ensure a soft, silent footstep. What looks like the knee is really the wrist, and what looks like a backward-turned knee in the hind leg is the heel, the true elbow and knee being almost hidden by the skin. In all carnivores the canine teeth are relatively very large. All of them have the senses of sight and hearing very well developed. The young are always born in a comparatively helpless condition, and are generally blind for some time after their birth.

THE CAT.

There is no record as to the first introduction of cats into New Zealand; but no doubt they were brought here by the very first settlers--perhaps earlier even, by the crews of vessels which called at Kororareka and other parts of this county in the very early whaling days. They do not seem to have strayed far from the haunts of men until rabbits began to multiply. Then, when the sheep-farmers found that the capacity of the country for carrying sheep was being seriously reduced by the vast increase of rabbits, they resorted to all sorts of devices to cope with the pest. One method was to purchase cats in the towns, take them out to the back country, feed them for a time till they became somewhat habituated to the locality, and then turn them loose. No doubt some died, but most of them became more or less wild, and learned to subsist on the smaller animals of the neighbourhood. Probably native ground-birds suffered most from their presence. They certainly destroyed many young rabbits, but it is also true that they were frequently found living and rearing their young in burrows alongside families of rabbits. They cleared off the rats, which were formerly so common, and they also largely exterminated lizards. My son, Dr. Allan Thomson, tells me that in the Awatere Valley, in Marlborough, rabbit-hunting cats are greatly esteemed by the settlers, and are believed to be much more efficient than stoats and weasels. They are only partly wild, as frequently the domestic cats feed their young on rabbits and interbreed freely with wild cats living near the homesteads. He observed a cat at Awapiri teaching two kittens to kill. She would leave the house, and in about ten minutes’ time would return with a baby rabbit, evidently obtained from a stop. When the kittens were very young she killed the rabbit and skinned it. A week or two later she would give them the dead rabbit with the skin just partially turned back, and they quickly learned to complete the skinning. Still later she gave them the live rabbit, with which at first they played, but in a very short time they learned to approach the rabbit from behind and grip it by the neck, lying practically on top of it and pinching the gullet until the rabbit was strangled. Cats, in his opinion, become rabbit-killers only when they are thus taught by their mothers, but once they acquire the habit they feed on little else.

Dieffenbach, writing of the Piako district in Auckland Province in 1839, says, “The cats, which, on becoming wild, have assumed the streaky grey colour of the original animal while in a state of nature, form a great obstacle to the propagation of any new kinds of birds, and also tend to the destruction of many indigenous species.” This statement about the colour of wild cats has been made much of. It is true to only a very limited extent, and I have always felt that such statements--coming from a traveller who had only limited means of observing the facts, and apparently founded his conclusions on a few isolated observations of the settlers--are not always safe to generalize from. In the present instance they led Darwin (in “The Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication”) to quote him, and to use the statement as a proof of the strong tendency to reversion shown by the cat when it escaped from domestication. At the time Dieffenbach wrote settlement was quite in its infancy, and cats had not long been introduced. It is probable, therefore, that his statement, whether the result of his own or other people’s observations, referred to cats which were themselves progeny of grey animals. It certainly is the case that in Central Otago, where cats were freely liberated to cope with the rabbit pest, animals of many and varied colours are now found wild. Mr. Robert Scott, formerly M.P. for Central Otago, who had exceptional opportunities for observing the facts, has recently given me most interesting information regarding this question. He says, “The wild cat was, no doubt, the descendant of the shepherd’s and miner’s tame cat. The predominating colour was grey-striped (or tiger-striped, as some people called them), occasionally yellow, and rarely black or black-and-white. The time I write of was the ‘seventies’--say, from 1870 on to the time when poisoning the rabbits with phosphorized grain came in. The cats, though not numerous, were fairly common, especially in districts where cover, such as fern and scrub, was plentiful. They grew to an immense size, and were game to the last if attacked; in fact, no dog would tackle one single-handed. They were always in the pink of condition, which may be accounted for by the abundance of feed available in the shape of wekas, ducks, and rats, with perhaps a dead sheep or bullock occasionally. When the rabbit-poisoning came in that class or variety of cat disappeared along with the wild pig and weka. The reason for the extermination of the cat is because it prefers the entrails to the flesh. Since that time, up to the present, cats have been turned out in considerable numbers, but the rabbit-trapping has effectually prevented their increase, and the survivors still retain their original colours--that is, black, black-and-white, grey, grey-and-white, &c.; but they are much smaller than the wild cat of forty years ago. My opinion is that had the original cat survived till to-day the colour would have invariably been grey, or, rather, grey-striped.”

Mr. H. C. Weir, of Ida Valley Station, Otago, states that on high country, where rabbit-traps are seldom if ever used, they grow to a very considerable size, and are most commonly of a grey colour; but yellow, grey-and-white, and black are also to be met with. He adds, “I cannot say I ever saw any approaching the tiger-like stripe of the Home-country wild cat, and I have seen a good few of them in the wilds of Sutherlandshire, Scotland.”

Some people consider that wild cats are responsible for much of the failure which has followed the constantly renewed attempts to naturalize game birds. At the annual meeting of the Wellington Acclimatization Society in 1898 a member said, “Cats are more destructive to game than all the hawks, weasels, and stoats in the colony. Most of the bush coverts are full of these cats, a fact which I myself proved near Feilding, where, with the assistance of traps baited with smoked fish, I caught many.” I think they may have contributed to some extent to this failure, but only in a few parts of the country, and then chiefly in the neighbourhood of settlements. Personally, I do not think that wild cats have had much to do with the extermination of introduced game. The whole question is a difficult one to get any definite knowledge upon, opinions differ so much. Thus Mr. Charles J. Peters, of Mount Somers, considers that wild cats are far more effective in keeping down rabbits than are stoats or weasels, and estimates that cats will kill more rabbits in a month than one of the others will in six months.

Mr. B. C. Aston, in a paper on the Kaikoura Mountains, speaks of the half-wild cats which are found about deserted fencers’ and musterers’ camps as retaining “all their love for man’s comradeship if encouraged, but they invariably refuse to eat anything that they have not killed themselves. They probably exist on rabbits, birds, and mice. As a result of their hunting habits their chest and forelegs are largely developed, and they have a look different from the ordinary cat, being leaner, and quicker in action.”

Wild cats, so my son Dr. Allan Thomson tells me, are the bane of the island sanctuaries of New Zealand, being present on Kapiti Island, Little Barrier Island, and Stephen Island, in which last they kill and eat the tuatara. They have been reduced to small numbers by shooting, but their complete extermination has not yet been accomplished.

When the Russian Commander Bellingshausen visited the Macquaries in 1820 he found numbers of wild cats hid among the foliage. There were at the time, however, two parties of traders (seal-hunters?) on the island, one of thirteen and the other of twenty-seven men, and these probably accounted for the cats.

Captain Musgrave, who was a castaway from the schooner “Grafton,” when she was wrecked on the Auckland Islands in 1864, found a cat in a trap more than a year after the date of the wreck. “She soon cleared the hut of mice, which were dreadfully common.”

In 1868 Mr. H. H. Travers, in his account of a visit to the Chatham Islands, states that wild cats were very abundant, and that they destroyed a great number of the indigenous birds.

WILD DOGS.

It may seem strange to speak of dogs as wild animals in New Zealand, and it is questionable whether there are any wild dogs at the present time, but in the early days of settlement they were fairly abundant, and were truly feral. Dogs are the most thoroughly domesticated of animals, and in none has the moral and intellectual faculties been more highly developed. But just as some men degrade these faculties to the basest uses and become a menace to the rest of their race, so some dogs--only a few, it must be admitted--go wild and become a menace to their human companions and masters.

It is of interest to remember that when Captain Cook came to New Zealand the Natives had dogs, which they had brought with them from their original homes in Polynesia. Most of the histories of the migrations of the Maori refer to the fact of their bringing dogs with them, so that they had probably been in the country for some centuries before the date of Cook’s visit in 1769. Crozet, who visited these Islands in 1772, saw these dogs, and described them as follows: “The dogs are a sort of domesticated fox, quite black or white, very low on the legs, straight ears, thick tail, long body, full jaws, but more pointed than that of the fox, and uttering the same cry. They do not bark like our dogs. These animals are only fed on fish, and it appears that the savages only raise them for food. Some were taken on board our vessels, but it was impossible to domesticate them like our dogs: they were always treacherous, and bit us frequently. They would have been dangerous to keep where poultry was raised or had to be protected: they would destroy them just like true foxes.”

Forster, in his account of Cook’s second voyage, writing of the Queen Charlotte Sound Natives in 1773, says, “A good many dogs were observed in their canoes, which they seemed very fond of, and kept tied with a string round their middle. They were of a rough, long-haired sort, with pricked ears, and much resembled the common shepherd’s cur or Count Buffon’s _chien de berger_. They were of different colours, some quite black and others perfectly white. The food which these dogs receive is fish, or the same as their masters live on, who afterwards eat their flesh and employ the fur in various ornaments and dresses.” Later on in the same journal he says, “The officers had ordered their black dog to be killed, and sent to the captain one-half of it. This day (June 9), therefore, we dined for the first time on a leg of it roasted, which tasted so exactly like mutton that it was absolutely undistinguishable.... In New Zealand and in the tropical isles of the South Sea the dogs are the most stupid, dull animals imaginable, and do not seem to have the least advantage in point of sagacity over our sheep. In the former country they are fed upon fish; in the latter, on vegetables.”

Bellingshausen, who visited New Zealand in 1820, says, “We saw no quadrupeds except dogs of a small species. Captain Lazarew bought a couple. They are rather small, have a woolly tail, erect ears, a large mouth, and short legs.”

Dieffenbach, writing nearly seventy years after Cook’s visit, remarks that “the native dog was formerly considered a dainty, and great numbers of them were eaten; but the breed having undergone an almost complete mixture with the European, their use as an article of food has been discontinued, as the European dogs are said by the Natives to be perfectly unpalatable. The New Zealand dog is different from the Australian dingo; the latter resembles in size and shape the wolf, while the former rather resembles the jackal.”

The Rev. Richard Taylor, author of “Te Ika a Maui,” who is not always a reliable authority where natural history is concerned, says, “The New Zealand dog was small and long-haired, of a dirty white or yellow colour, with a bushy tail. This the Natives say they brought with them when they first came to these Islands.” Then he adds, “It is not improbable, however, that they found another kind already in the country, brought by the older Melanesian race, with long white hair and black tail: it is said to have been very quiet and docile.”

The Maori dog has totally disappeared. Mr. S. Percy Smith, of New Plymouth, tells me that the last one he heard of was about 1896. But I have mentioned it here because it was in part the progenitor of the wild dogs which afterwards became such a dangerous nuisance to sheep-breeders.

When settlement began European dogs must have crossed freely with the native animal, and many, both of the introduced and crossed dogs, became truly wild, especially as there were sheep and goats to worry, and pigs to chase and kill.

Dr. Lyall, who was surgeon on H.M.S. “Acheron” during the survey of the coast of New Zealand in 1844, says of the kakapo, or owl-parrot, that “at a very recent period it was common all over the west coast of the Middle Island; but _there is now a race of wild dogs_ said to have overrun all the northern part of this shore, and to have almost exterminated the kakapo wherever they have reached.” Brunner, who visited the West Coast a few years later, makes a similar statement in his Journal. The early settlers could not distinguish between Maori dogs and these wild, half-bred curs. Thus R. Gillies, writing in after-years of the early days of the Otago settlement, which was formed in 1848, says, “For some years after the settlers arrived here the wild dog was the terror of the flockmaster, and the object of his inveterate hostility.” W. D. Murison, formerly editor of the _Otago Daily Times_, writing at the same period (1877), tells how in 1858 he and his brother took up country in the Maniototo Plains, which they reached by the valley of the Shag River. The wild dogs were very troublesome. The first was caught by a kangaroo-dog, apparently imported from Australia for the purpose of hunting them. “This particular wild dog was yellow in colour, and so was the second killed; but the bulk of those ultimately destroyed by us were black-and-white, showing a marked mixture of the collie. The yellow dogs looked like a distinct breed. They were low-set, with short pricked ears, broad forehead, sharp snout, and bushy tail. Indeed, those acquainted with the dingo professed to see little difference between that animal and the New Zealand yellow wild dog. It may be remarked, however, that most of the other dogs we killed, although variously coloured, possessed nearly all the other characteristics of the yellow dog. The wild dogs were generally to be met with in twos and threes; they fed chiefly on quail, ground-larks, young ducks, and occasionally on pigs. On one occasion, when riding through the Idaburn Valley, we came across four wild dogs baiting a sow and her litter of young ones in a dry, tussocky lagoon. To our annoyance our own dogs joined in the attack upon the sow, and the wild dogs got away without our getting one of them.... In all we destroyed fifty-two dogs between September, 1858, and December, 1860.”

Taylor White, writing in 1889, says, “I consider these dogs entirely distinct from the European dog. For the wild dogs met with on the Waimakariri River, in the alpine ranges of Canterbury, during the year 1856, were in colour and markings identical with those found in the alpine region of Lake Wakatipu in 1860, a distance of several hundred miles apart. There seems little room to doubt that they were an original Maori dog. The fact of their wanting the two tan spots over the eyes mostly seen in European dogs of approximate colour is a very strong evidence also in favour of this opinion.”

At one time wild dogs were so common in Marlborough and did so much damage on the sheep-runs that packs of hunting-dogs were bred for the special purpose of running them down. As settlement proceeded and the country became opened up wild dogs were gradually exterminated. The only ones which are now met with are curs which have taken to rabbits or to sheep-killing, and have managed to escape from their owners.

Bellingshausen reported wild dogs on the Macquaries in 1820, but it is improbable that they long survived the sealers, who probably generally brought them to the islands. As soon as the killing of seals and sea-lions stopped the dogs in all probability died out. Captain Musgrave, who was wrecked on Auckland Island in 1864, discovered wild dogs, like sheep-dogs, on the island. Their case, however, was probably similar to those on the Macquaries, for I am not aware that any subsequent visitor to the island has seen them.

In a reprint from the Auckland _Herald_ of the 18th November, 1866, we read, “It is not generally known that about Otamatea and the Wairoa the bush is infested with packs of wild dogs, as ferocious, but more daring, than wolves. These dogs hunt in packs of from three to six or eight. They are strong, gaunt, large animals, and dangerous when met by a man alone. Not long since a Maori, when travelling from one settlement to another through the forest, was attacked by three of these animals at dusk, and only saved himself by climbing into a tree, where he was kept prisoner until late the next day. The extensive district over which these packs roam was once well stocked with wild pigs, but most of these have fallen victims to the dogs, and since this supply of food has failed the dogs have ventured after dark to the neighbourhood of Native settlements and the homesteads of European settlers in quest of prey.”