GirLLIES.— Notes on some Changes in the Fauna of Otago. 821 
the settlers’ imported pig. Their flesh, too, tasted quite different from 
pork, being more like venison than anything else. But pig-hunting, the 
New Zealand sport of sports, has long become only a tradition of the past. 
Bo, too, the wild dog (Canis familiaris) is now unknown. For some 
years after the settlers arrived here the wild dog was the terror of the flock- 
master, and the object of his inveterate hostility. The damage sustained 
by many settlers was very great, and rewards were offered and paid for the 
destruction of this predatory animal. It was not always or habitually that 
the wild dog attacked the flc ks, for even where there were numbers of 
them weeks would go past without the loss of any sheep, and this shows 
that they must have had other means of subsistence which they depended 
principally upon, and which they must, indeed, have entirely depended 
upon before the introduction of sheep by the settlers into the country. But 
when the peculiar wail or howl of the wild dog was heard in the still night 
air, a sound which I cannot describe to you, but having something peculiarly 
weird and unearthly about it, quite different from the howl of any ordinary 
dog, and one which once heard by yon could never be forgotten, then the 
shepherds with their dogs and guns had to turn out and save the defenceless 
flock. Most exciting accounts were sometimes told of the hunting of these 
wild dogs, for it was a curious fact that, as a rule, they ran from any tame 
dog, and that tame dogs, as a rule, would follow and attack them with all 
their masters’ antipathy. Of course there were exceptions; where, for 
instance, a wild dog happened to be, as sometimes was the case, a pig dog 
of the bull-terrier breed gone wild from the Maori or whaling settlements. 
But the bulk of the wild dogs were not domestic animals gone wild, but the 
true old Maori wild dog. I know that this statement will be questioned by 
many who have never believed that there were genuine old-identity wild 
dogs in New Zealand before Europeans brought them here, even though 
Captain Cook, in his first voyage to New Zealand, p. 184, states :—* In this 
country there are no quadrupeds but dogs and rats, at least we saw no other, 
and the rats are so scarce that many of us never saw them. The dogs live 
with the people who breed them for no other purpose than to eat; there 
might indeed be quadrupeds that we did not see; but this is not probable 
because the chief pride of the natives with respect to their dress is in the 
skins and hair of such animals as they have, and we never saw the skin of 
any animal about them, but those of dogs and birds." But the fact of their 
existence is now pretty well settled, first by the fact of actual specimens of 
two having been shot some years ago at the Wyndham, and their skeletons 
preserved now in the British Museum, and the skin of one of them in the 
Colonial Museum, and by the fact of the finding of the remains of a dog 
in Taranaki some nineteen feet below the surface, as detailed in a paper by 
Pl 
