Well the election is over and all our kids wanted to know about the prospective leaders was what their party’s possum policy was.
It is currently illegal to have a pet possum in New Zealand without permission from the Department of Conservation. First time offenders face a $500 fine and DoC will usually order the possum to be destroyed. Failure to comply with this order results in a $1000 fine and a $50 per day charge until this order is met. I assume the reasoning is that possums are a pest in New Zealand. They feast on native foliage, they destroy the eggs of precious native birds and they can spread bovine tuberculosis. So it is with great trepidation that I write this post…
A few weeks ago a friend (who shall remain anonymous – assuming we are not tortured 
) asked us if we would like a baby possum that they had come across. It was only about the size of your hand and incredibly cute. An incident at college last year immediately sprung to mind. A hard case rural student of mine had her beanie sitting over the top of her pencil case in class and I had noticed her keeping a close eye on the woolly beanie and sneaking her hand under it. I thought I had caught her in an act of smuggling a cell phone onto her desk and was feeling smug about my astute skills of observation. So I whipped the beanie off, grabbed the pencil case and said: ”I’ll have that.” Only to find myself in the arkward situation of what to do with a confisicated baby possum! Anyway I did return it to the student to take home on the grounds that it wouldn’t appear at school again and on discussing the incident with my colleagues I discovered that keeping a possum as a pet is in fact illegal. Perhaps the student should’ve been more seriously reprimanded. But I’m a softie when it comes to baby animals, which brings me back to this story.
Of course I said that we’d look after the baby possum, but only if it technically was not a pet. After a couple of weeks, when it could fend for itself, we would release it outside and it would have to take its chances in the wild. The kids named her Joey and she spent hours attached to Finn and Tahlia, often sitting on their heads as they went about their usual activities. We kept to the plan and released Joey, tears flowed and that was that. Until three nights later, when scratching was heard on the lounge window. You guessed it – Joey. A little play and we put her back out. But she just keeps coming back every few nights and sometimes during the day. Today she appeared in my washing basket and nearly gave me a heart attack (our toilet and washhouse are in a room outside the main house). Visitors get a bit freaked out to arrive at our place and have a possum charge down from the nearest tree, run up them and plonk itself on their head. The cat wasnt too impressed either when it decided to leap onto its back. Of course it’s still not a pet, just a friendly wild possum…
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