Brush-tailed possumWikimedia Commons/Benjamint444
There’s a petition out urging a stop to an alleged scheme to raise money by killing baby possums in New Zealand. But, it’s illustrated by a photo of the wrong animal: a Virginia opossum.[teaserbreak]
The error is, to me, sadly illustrative of a major reason why we find it hard to truly respect animals: we don’t tend to know much about them. The Virginia opossum is a member of the family Didelphidae, of which there are about 103 species, all found only in the Western Hemisphere, and only one in the U.S. and Canada.
Thinking one opossum is the same as any other animal with a similar name reminds me why I didn’t agree with U.S. President Ronald Regan’s assessment that once you have seen one tree, you’ve seen them all. I find it sad that we’re so blind to the magnificent diversity of nature.
Our opossums are the only marsupials in the western hemisphere, evolved from common ancestry with the many diverse species of marsupials found mainly in the Australia/South Asia region, many of which bear the common name “possum.” Note that these are two different words, albeit by a single letter. But, like “brush” and “bush,” they do convey similar but different meanings.
The Common Brush-tailed Possum is native only to Australia, where it has suffered significant declines in some areas but is widespread and not endangered.
As animal protectionists, I think we should know that this species was introduced into New Zealand around 1837. Why? For the fur industry! Possum fur, unlike Virginia opossum fur, is dense and even, and thus valued by the fur industry.
The fur industry likes to claim that it is ecologically benign, but lacking natural predators in New Zealand, the brush-tailed possums became both a “pest” to humans and deleterious to the survival of various unique plants and birds, which evolved in the absence of such predators (there are no possums, weasels, cats, Canids or other mammalian predators native to New Zealand) and were thus vulnerable to predation when humans arrived, starting with the ancestors of the Māoris.
None of this excuses a contest based on cruelty, although having just rescued a half-grown Virginia opossum and kept him until he was strong enough to be moved to a wildlife rehabber for final assessment and soft release, I can’t say I see it as all that much worse than hunting opossums in the hills of Tennessee, or wherever; or trapping furbearing animals anywhere. All of it leads to cruelty, perpetrated with rationales intact by people sure they are doing nothing wrong.
Sign the petition by all means, but perhaps the real villain here is the fur industry.
Possums are just as deserving of life as opossums, but they are separated from each other by tens of millions of years of evolution and are less closely related to each other than cats are to foxes. In my opinion, we should know and respect them for what they really are.
Keep wildlife in the wild,
Barry
PS: And, in honoring the possums, opossums, foxes, racoons, minks, and other furbearing animals, remember to always “shop the fox,” and support stores who have taken the pledge to go fur free by visiting www.furfreeretailor.com.