Gillies. — yotcs on some Chawjes in l]te Fauna of Otaf/o. 321 



the settlers' imported pig. Their iiesh, too, tasted quite different from 

 pork, being more Hke venison than anything else. But pig-huntiug, the 

 New Zealand sport of sports, has long become only a tradition of tlie past. 

 So, 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 flocks, 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 you 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, m 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 m 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 



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