Homegrown smart traps are keeping backyards and bush pest free – including those cute spiky things snuffling around on lawns at night.

This is an excerpt from our weekly business newsletter Stocktake.

A rogue rodent has been terrorising our home. For the past few months, a pesky possum has been leaping across fences, running across rooftops, climbing through trees and generally making a noisy nuisance of itself. Sometimes I go outside to watch our resident cute hedgehogs run around on the grass at night and our problem possum lurches into view, its eyes glinting fiercely in the moonlight, ruining the moment.

For months, I’ve wondered, “How do I get rid of that damn thing?’”

That’s why I’m on a Zoom call with Dave Shoemack and Craig Bond. Together they run Goodnature, a Wellington company making smart traps that exterminates pests “humanely”. Unlike other traps, no poison or glue or inescapable box is involved in this New Zealand-made product. Instead, their traps kill unwanted possums, stoats, mice and rats instantly then reset until the next one shows up. Their mission statement is “Rewild the world” and it seems to be working: their traps are available in 40 countries.

They’re popular because they’re easy to use. Customers set them up low on the ground and a tube of lure (a chocolate or meat paste) entices an unwanted animal within range. When it reaches its head up to lick the lure, a trigger is initiated. “A piston, powered by gas, comes from the side straight into the animal’s head and kills it humanely within a couple of seconds,” says Shoemack.

A notification is sent to the phone of the trap’s owner alerting it to the kill and the trap resets, ready for the next one. Goodnature’s range of traps can be left to do their thing for months at a time. Using the app, kills are catalogued among many others, showing just how many unwanted pests have been captured around the country.

This sounds like exactly what I need. But I’m worried about my pets. The pair inform me their traps are too small for my cat or my dog to get hurt in any way. “We have no evidence of a dog ever getting into these traps,” says Bond, who tells me their specialist possum trap has just been taken off the market as it needs a refresh. He assures me it should be back in action soon.

But there’s another problem. As Bond patiently informs me that my annoying possum isn’t my only problem pest that needs dealing with, my jaw drops.

My snuffly hedgehogs need to go too.

“I know hedgehogs are cute and everyone loves them but they do a huge amount of damage,” says Bond, the company’s co-founder. “[Our traps] will definitely kill hedgehogs and we make no apologies for that here in New Zealand. They are a really big problem and that problem is growing.”

Hedgehogs are a problem? That’s news to me. Bond tells me it’s true. Shoemack, who joined Goodnature as CEO, recently installed a Goodnature trap in his backyard only to find a hedgehog was the first thing it killed. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, what have I done?’” he says. Dismayed, he ran into the office the next day to ask what was going on.

Bond told him what he told me, then listed all the damage hedgehogs can do. “They cruise along the forest floor eating everything … all the ground-dwelling invertebrates, all the eggs, all the ground-nesting birds,” he says. “We’re finding them spread further and further into the bush relatively recently … They’re super killers. They just mess up everything.”

Rats, stoats and mice, which their traps also deal with, do damage of a different kind. “They’re eating baby bird chicks, lots of little invertebrates, lizards, wētā. They’re the primary food source for our bigger animals like morepork (ruru) and all sorts of bigger birds. [The rat’s eating] poison and then our native bird species have been killed through secondary poisoning by eating the dead rat.”

These problems have been growing and demand for Goodnature’s traps is at an all-time high. The company’s been in business for 20 years but things have really taken off across the past five, with it doubling in size thanks to growth across America, the UK and Europe. They’re now celebrating after selling their 500,000th trap and receiving recent investment from Gallagher Group. From Newtown, Wellington, where their traps are built by hand, they’re cleaning up bush and backyards all over the world.

But there’s no getting past the fact that an animal is being killed every time one of Goodnature’s traps is used successfully. Is that really humane? “It’s a tricky one, we’ve all struggled with it,” says Bond. “But that’s why we put so much effort into being as humane as possible, and as targeted as possible, and ensuring that we don’t kill non-target species. We’re trying to control an invasive species which is causing massive problems to biodiversity. Ultimately, we believe it’s justified because of the gains we get through both biodiversity and the health of our forests, the health of our land and waterways, and then ultimately, the health of our people.”

That might go over the head of my daughter, who just loves her little hedgehogs. How do I break the news to her that her spiky friends are a massive problem and need to be killed in the garden? Bond faced the same thing with his own daughters, and he did so by explaining there was a simple choice to make. “We either have a hedgehog or we have lots of native birds and invertebrates and really healthy forests regenerating,” he says. “That’s the choice, because that’s what the hedgehog takes from us.”