2016-03-21 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – March 21, 2016 an impact assessment and in fact this programmatic impact assessment – the \[sounds like Diphacinone usage is only one small part of the – it’s a – it’s a – it’s just a tool kit – a list of very – a lot of different treatments to get rid of rodents and the mongoose and it talks about not just Diphacinone but also traps, ah, self, ah, multi-hit traps and a lot of other ways to approach the issue, so if there is some sensitivity, if there’s some issues we’re concerned about this programatic EIS will help us analyze which techniques, if it’s appropriate to use Diphacinone OK, if it’s not – there’s a multitude of other integrated pest management options that we’ll have and that is the purpose of this programmatic impact statement is that – allow us to do a thorough analysis of it now, so that when we do need to use something to control rodents – we can take this tool box and look through it and see what’s most appropriate – do a site specific evaluation of – to ensure that that’s the most appropriate method and then we use – but Diphacinone is not the only option, by far, and it’s only an option that we use after extreme consideration. TL: \[Unclear\] one second now… ?: Yeah, we do a lot of cage trapping, snap trapping. There’s a lot of other methodologies that we use to control animals. TL: Yeah, one of the concerns that I think people have are that this has been tried here once before – badly – and, um, and on top of that, you know, the Broadcast treatment is supposed to be something like fifteen pounds per acre and you guys were spraying or dropping like 17 ½ pounds per acre – so you weren’t following your own protocols and… ?: That, that wasn’t us. TL: Oh, OK. ?: It was Kamehameha Schools and it was a – it was definitely a project gone bad… There’s a whole bunch of reasons for that – we can talk about it – maybe better to talk about it off line, cause there’s a whole bunch of things that happened in that particular case, um, but it was, it was not applied at the rate that it was supposed to be applied at and there were some other technicalities having to do with, ah, with the way that they tested it, ah, prior, and it was also not done in a fenced area and, um, you know, so the pigs, you know, they were testing it on pigs to find out what the lethal dose was but the pig feed, ah, that they were using for these caged animals had Vitamin K supplement in it – which is an antidote for Diphacinone and so they were using these caged pigs, feeding ‘em a feed with an antidote in it and feeding ‘em Diphacinone and it could hardly kill ‘em and so they’re like, “Wow, it’s safe.” But nobody realized, you know, 5