It is a question the anti-fur lobby has never had to face before. But a number of respected wildlife groups, including the WWF, are backing calls for the New Zealand government to support a fledgling fur-trapping industry that turns brush-tailed possums into items such as coats, hats and possum wool socks.

They say that the current eradication programme is not an effective way to control a pest whose numbers are spiralling out of control.

Brush-tailed possums were introduced from Australia in 1837. Their numbers have since risen to around 75 million and they eat their way through everything from saplings to birds’ eggs.

The government spends millions of dollars a year trying to eradicate the possums by dropping poisoned bait from helicopters. But some retail companies, supported by groups such as the WWF, have opted for a more controversial solution – trap and kill the possums for their fur.

Cat fight

“You have environmentalists and the fur lobby fighting each other, and it’s become a big cat fight,” says Ben Van Dyke, whose New Zealand Nature Company is one of the leading producers of possum fur products.

Van Dyke markets his products as “Ecofur”, a word that must seem like an oxymoron to many wildlife campaigners. But he says that many environmentalists want immediate action to be taken against the pests, and the only disagreement in New Zealand is between those who consider poisoning to be the more humane solution and those who prefer trapping. “But overseas people don’t understand the issue. We get lots of hate mail,” he says.

The New Zealand government still favours using aerial applications of the poisons sodium monofluoroacetate and cholecalciferol for most possum control and has yet to give its full support to the trappers.

The trappers and traders want the government to set up a plant that could process possum pelts, skins and even meat, which is eaten in Asia for its supposed aphrodisiac qualities, and actively support a possum fur export drive.

But one animal welfare group is calling for a complete halt to the killing. “Possum species are best left alone, but if they have to be controlled there are more humane alternatives, such as contraceptive methods,” says Sean Gifford of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

In 1972, sociologist Jessie Bernard looked at symptoms of anxiety, depression, neurosis and passivity in married and unmarried people. She found that men were better off married than single, and concluded that they got those benefits at the expense of women. That became a central tenet of the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s, and is still often cited.

But psychologist David de Vaus from La Trobe University in Melbourne points out that Bernard’s research only looked at a narrow definition of stress. “It is well known that women are much more likely to score highly on those disorders,” he says. Most research has ignored the fact that mental disorder can manifest itself in men in the form of drug and alcohol abuse, de Vaus claims.

De Vaus looked at data from 10,641 adults taken from the 1996 national survey of mental health in Australia, which includes drug abuse among its indicators of stress.

In the winter issue of Family Matters, the journal of the Australian Institute of Family Studies, de Vaus writes that the percentage of married men and women suffering stress was the same, at just 13 per cent.

Work and kids

He also found that 25 per cent of both women and men were miserable when single. Married women with children and a job had the fewest mental health problems of the female sample, suggesting that kids are not as stress-inducing as some parents like to claim.

The findings add hard data to ideas already taking hold in the US. In 2001, Linda Waite’s book The Case for Marriage: Why married people are happier, healthier and better off financially cited other studies that overturn Bernard’s theories.

Psychologists are now debating whether Bernard’s conclusions have always been flawed, or whether women have become genuinely happier inside marriage over the past 30 years.

The spectacular crash of a supersonic aeroplane prototype in the Australian desert on Sunday was not due to problems with the aircraft itself but with a link to the booster rocket, engineers have told 91av.

The Japanese experimental plane NEXST (National Experimental Airplane for Next Generation Supersonic Transport) was supposed to make its maiden flight over the Woomera test facility in South Australia after being carried aloft by a booster rocket. Instead, the rocket left its planned trajectory and crashed seconds after launch.

Senior engineer Kimio Sakata countered media suggestions that the plane itself had crashed, due to a flaw in the technology. “The problem was experimental,” he told 91av. “It involved the connection – the bolts holding the plane to the rocket – which caused a sudden separation. I don’t think we have any problems with the aeroplane.”

Woomera was the location of a successful scramjet test in October 2001, in which the international HyShot team tested supersonic combustion in flight. NASA’s scramjet project, the Hyper-X (X-43A), encountered similar problems to NEXST in June 2001 when the rocket carrying it malfunctioned.

Silent boom

NEXST is designed to break the sound barrier silently, by “coordinating” the sonic booms on its leading edges. As the plane breaks the sound barrier, its shape causes the sonic booms to travel to the ground out of phase, effectively cancelling each other out.

If successful, the tests could eventually lead to a commercial airliner that can fly at supersonic speeds over residential areas. Concorde, the world’s only commercial supersonic jet, is restricted in its choice of flight paths as it can only go supersonic over water.

Sunday’s NEXST test was the first in a series planned by Japan’s National Aerospace Laboratory (NAL). The 11.5-metre model should have been lifted to 18 kilometres above the Earth by the booster rocket. The model should then have separated and dived towards the Earth at more than twice the speed of sound.

Sakata says the second test was originally scheduled for the end of November, but that will now be delayed. “I hope it will take place within half a year,” he says.

NAL hopes to finish the current phase of tests in 2007 and have a commercial 100-seat supersonic airliner ready within 20 years.