SPANIARD: Yellow-eyed penguins on Ngāi Tahu’s menu

Ngāi Tahu killing and consuming endangered yellow-eyed penguins is now okay in the eyes of the Yellow-eyed Penguin Trust. It’s also okay, apparently, with the Department of Conservation. Treaty religiosity drives the organisations’ extraordinary loss of compass.

In a DOC-published recovery plan, Te KawekaTakohaka mõ te Hoiho 2019-2029, created by ‘partners’ including Ngāi Tahu, the Trust, and DOC, the tribe cites its former consumption of yellow-eyed penguins and its interest in returning to the practices it says are “responsibilities as kaitiaki”, with no demur from those partners.

Easy-to-see lines have been crossed. There are a charitable trust’s misfeasance against its own purpose, a government agency’s perversion of its mandated duty, and subordination of well-developed science to tribal ‘thinks and feels’. There’s wider risk to public confidence in such institutions. And, of course, there’s existential threat to the bird featured on our nation’s $5 banknote.

A mix of credulity, reverence for tribal practice, and fear of challenging Māori is at work in the institutions. For Ngāi Tahu, the game’s a tactical powerplay mocking those institutions and their corruptibility, and, because there’s no easy return from such corruptibility, gaining assurance of its continuing.

Enabled by the penguins’ listing as a ‘taonga species’ in the tribe’s claims settlement legislation, the recovery plan states, “Kāi Tahu [Ngāi Tahu] harvested hoiho, eggs, feathers, and bones according to traditional management practices and guided by tikaka [tikanga] passed down through the generations.” With a faux voice of reason, it says, “Kāi Tahu aspire to return to these practices when hoiho populations return to a healthy and self-sustaining state.”

Killing the birds is not, however, a reasonable proposition. Ngāi Tahu’s case is, in fact, startlingly poor: in scientific terms, in its tikanga basis, and in its wider framing as ‘traditional’. As a power move, in its targeting a widely-known and -loved species and its heavying of two organisations not built for skirmishing, it’s gauche.

The species is presently described as Nationally Endangered, a threat status just two steps from Extinct in New Zealand’s threat classification system. Living nowhere else on the planet, it has never proliferated. It expanded to the mainland and Rakiura around 500 years ago from an original Auckland and Campbell islands range, with the mainland migrants colonising places of earlier species extinguished by pre-European Māori. The Waitaha penguin, a fellow yellow-eyed subspecies, was one of those extinguished (the other yellow-eyed subspecies, Richdale’s, lived on the Chatham Islands and was eliminated also). Yellow-eyed penguins depend heavily on a small number of ‘super-breeders’, around 5% of the total; loss of even one could be perilous for the birds’ future.

In citing tikanga as basis for killing them (necessarily, since the tribe’s claim to that hunting is based on its settlement Act’s recognition of the concept), the recovery plan ignores that such practice was the first blunt force in yellow-eyed penguins’ decline. Even if it could determine when the population is “healthy and self-sustaining” and could allow sustainable kills (it almost certainly can’t), that assessment would be based on reckons and good luck, not evidence. And if it were empirically founded, it would simply be ‘science’, not tikanga, not ownable by Ngāi Tahu, and no basis for traditional hunting of yellow-eyed penguins. 

Such inconsistency is pervasive in Ngāi Tahu’s ‘tradition’ narrative. From the tribe’s taonga species concept, which picks favourites and doesn’t acknowledge other species the favourites depend on, to its practitioners’ now-dependence on modern accoutrements for exercising traditions, to its cherry-picking certain pre-European customs for modern practice to the exclusion of thoroughly abhorrent ones, its rhetoric does not lie straight.

(It also doesn’t help any aspect of the matter that Ngāi Tahu derailed aspects of the scientifically-founded and relevant Campbell Island and southeast marine reserve proposals.)

The Yellow-eyed Penguin Trust effectively has a new end-purpose for increasing the birds’ numbers: their consumption by Ngāi Tahu. For DOC, whose legislation demands protection of the birds for their “intrinsic value”, it is dereliction of lawful duty; a Treaty provision in that legislation is part, only, of its wider conservation mandate.

With both organisations so Treaty-benighted, the penguins’ fortunes now rest on a single under-review law, the Wildlife Act 1953, for an outright ‘no’ to their hunting by Ngāi Tahu. It’s likely the updated Act will greenlight that hunting.

A mix of word-blancmange and silence met requests by a Yellow-eyed Penguin Trust supporter for relevant information from the Trust. An obtained email written by its general manager says: “Hoiho could be harvested if the population grew back to a sustainable level. This is not foreseeable in the short to midterm future, so as such it is not a topic that will realistically be raised for some time. It would be wonderful if the Hoiho returned to a level where this was possible. I would like to think that the Yellow Eyed Penguin Trust had succeeded in it's [sic] role and was no longer needed.” Relevant Trust meeting minutes requested were not supplied. 

In 1987, it was a different story. The Yellow-eyed Penguin Trust was founded with a science-based vision Trustees, the public, and sponsors could believe in. Two years later, Mainland Cheese got on board. Since then, the company’s promotion and fundraising have won hearts and over $2.5 million for the penguins and the Trust. Television audiences will remember Mainland’s advocacy, including Southland actor Roy Wesney outside Hokitika’s Mahinapua Hotel telling a penguin, “Stick with me, mate. I’ll see you get home in one piece.”

Mainland last year renewed its arrangement with the Trust until July 2028. Perhaps its new French owner, Lactalis, is unaware of its collusion with Ngāi Tahu in the tribe’s ‘aspiration’ to harvest the birds. The Trust certainly does little to inform the wider public of its new de facto purpose.

The North Stars of the Yellow-eyed Penguin Trust and the Department of Conservation have been lost, unfathomably, to tribal non-sense they should have at least called out and, in the end, should have refused to be distracted by.

Keeping up traditions is fine if there are no downsides. In this case, upholding tradition means making victims of science, the law, and the public good – and of that rare penguin whose guardians can no longer be trusted.

Spaniard has a background in conservation, farming, and recreation.