"There is no question that the Government had made a mistake in removing all protection from the killing of the opossum." Thus spoke Mr G. W. McIntosh, president of the Otago Acclimatisation Society, yesterday to a Daily Times reporter, who had waited on him to get his opinion of the action of the Government in declaring that opossums shall cease to be deemed imported game, within the meaning of the Animals' Protection Act, as from August 20.
Continuing, Mr McIntosh said his society had sent a ranger to the Owaka district to investigate the assertions made by Mr Malcolm, M.P., that fruit gardens and the farms of the settlers were suffering from the depredations of the opossum. The ranger's report went to show that a big majority of the settlers considered that the opossum was not a harmful animal.
"There is no doubt in my mind that the removal of the protection will shortly result in the extermination of the little marsupial," continued Mr McIntosh.
"At the instigation of Mr Malcolm, acting under the influence of one or two Owaka residents, the Mackenzie Government ignored the recommendation of our society that the protection of the opossum should be removed for only three months in the winter; they to be trapped, shot, or hunted, but not poisoned; the skins to be offered, if thought fit, for sale, but not more than 30 animals to be taken in the season by one licensee. The present Government has now gone one better and knocked off the restrictions altogether. What would have been a very profitable local industry, therefore, bids fair to be shortly nipped in the bud."
• How a doctor was the means of getting into Woolwich Academy a boy who had been too short was narrated recently by Dr G. A. Gibson, of Edinburgh, at a sectional meeting of the British Medical Association at Liverpool. The 18-year-old son of one of his medical friends was 1in below 5ft in height. He had set his whole mind on entering Woolwich, for which his only chance was about six months ahead.
The family, said Dr Gibson, turned to him in deep distress, and he resorted to thyroid extract, by the employment of which the youth grew seven inches in six months. As he obtained one of the highest places in the entrance examination, it was obvious that the cerebral functions had been in no way disturbed by the treatment. The thyroid gland, situated in the neck, secretes a substance which is absorbed by the blood or lymph, and which exerts a profound influence on the nutrition of the body. A preparation from the thyroid gland of a sheep is used, among other directions, in cases of stunted growth. - ODT, 6.9.1912.
