Fox Eradication A Costly Failure, But Not For The Reasons You Expect

          In 1998 a stowaway fox hopped off a ship in Burnie, Tasmania. It was spotted sniffing around a local beach before darting away into the bush, and was never seen again. It almost assuredly had no idea how much trouble it was about to cause.
          Foxes are a pest in mainland Australia. This is actually a huge understatement; after colonists introduced them in 1845, hoping to shoot them for sport, the population exploded. Today, Melbourne has up to 16 foxes per square kilometer, for a total around 7 million nationwide. They devour native animals, eating birds at a stunning estimated rate of 361 per minute.
           Tasmania has thus far been spared this devastation, which is why so many species like bandicoots, quolls, devils, and birds still thrive there. Therefore, it makes sense on the surface that Tasmania would make a herculean effort to remain fox-free.

           However, the Fox Eradication Program launched in 2002 has brought harsh criticism, and it is not difficult to see why. For one, the number of foxes in Tasmania is and has always been extremely low, quite possibly zero. While occasional stowaways have been found like the one in Burnie, there is no evidence that a breeding population has ever existed. Secondly, the FEP received $5 million a year for ten years to carry out its operations, money which could have gone towards other, arguably more critical conservation programs. Finally, the operations of the program have been criticized by scientists and policy-makers as needlessly opaque and confusing, and with the potential to cause significant harm to native wildlife. FEP seeded the island with 1080 poison baits, which can be
deadly to foxes but cause less harm to other wildlife. However, the complete environmental effects of 1080 are not fully studied.
          After ten years, the FEP cannot conclusively show a single fox has lived in Tasmania during the years the project operated, let alone was exterminated by their efforts. Several pelts and scat samples have been found, but pelts were legal to import into Tasmania for years and the DNA analysis used for determining scat origin has come under criticism for lax anti-contamination measures. Furthermore, the scats presented by the program appear to be widely distributed geographically, but none are from the same or even closely related individuals, and none contain DNA from any Tasmanian endemic species, which would validate claims that they actually were collected in Tasmania. While so far few people have accused the program of falsifying evidence, these issues continue to haunt its operations. One thing is for sure - if we see a fox in Tasmania, we'll have a lot of people very interested in seeing the pictures.

http://www.theglobalmail.org/feature/the-50-million-fox-hunt/91/
http://tasmaniantimes.com/index.php/article/why-the-tasmanian-fox-eradication-program-has-been-