Across the country, an unlikely union has formed between pest trappers and a popstar-backed limited-edition Oreo flavour. Alex Casey reports.
Last year, American popstar, actor and beauty mogul Selena Gomez launched a surprising new expansion of her empire: Oreos. The chocolate and cinnamon limited-edition creme cookies, described as “flavour-forward and horchata-inspired”, popped up in hypnotic displays in supermarkets across the country in July, complete with a giant rotating cookie that simply read “Oreo Selena Gomez”. The promotional material claimed the cookies were “great for movie night, and make wonderful birthday treats and music awards watch party snacks”.
What neither Selena Gomez nor Big Oreo could ever have anticipated is that these cookies, which feature music-themed designs including “Selena in the Studio” and “Play Your Heart Out”, would become a crucial weapon in the war against one of Aotearoa’s most infamous pests.
Nearly 200 years before the arrival of Selena Gomez Oreos, European settlers first introduced possums to Aotearoa. They’ve been wreaking havoc on our natural ecosystem ever since. Possums eat native birds and their eggs, contributing to 25 million killed each year. They spread tuberculosis to livestock, costing farmers $35 million a year. They devour fruit, berries and young trees, depriving others of food and stunting the growth of native forests. After a hard night’s destruction, they steal cosy holes in tree trunks otherwise occupied by native birds.
While traditional possum control methods like hunting, trapping and poisoning work well in the beginning, wildlife biologist Graham Hickling explains that there are always “recalcitrant survivors” left in any pest management area. “Some maybe had a bad experience with a trap or a bait – maybe they got whacked by the trap but escaped, or didn’t eat enough bait and got a really bad stomach ache,” he explains. “There’s also a personality effect – some possums are bold, some are shy, some are cautious and exploratory, and others are just very timid.”
Determined to solve our stubborn possum problem, Hickling recently ran a pilot trial on a rural property in Leeston, Canterbury. He wanted to test whether pre-feeding the possums near the trap would build up their confidence enough that they would eventually put their head inside, much like a teenager pre-loading on Cruisers before a party. In fact, the initial experiment actually toyed with the idea of giving possums addictive psychoactive drugs to increase their motivation and confidence to enter the trap, but ultimately proved too challenging to execute in captivity.
“We wanted to try something that we could do in the field that mimicked the effect of a psychoactive drug,” Hickling explains. “And that’s when I came across this psychological paper which suggested that a combination of fat and sugar was quite addictive.” That finding, combined with a US study on rats that used Oreo cookies, sent Hickling down to the local New World. “It just so happened that they had these Selena Gomez Oreos, which I hadn’t even heard of. They had both cinnamon and chocolate, which possums like, and they were on sale.”
Hickling estimates he bought 20 packets of Selena Gomez Oreos for the trial, and soon was out in the field in Leeston attaching the cookies along the planks that lead up to the possum traps. “One of the things that’s nice about an Oreo is that you can just drill a little hole through it and just tap it on with a flathead nail,” he says. “People have tried to use Tim Tams in the past, but they are really expensive. Oreos are quite a bit cheaper, and they actually stand up to the rain quite well too, which is a little disconcerting.”
It wasn’t just the structural integrity – the possums bloody loved the “flavour-forward and horchata-inspired” treat. “They would come each night, and they would take the Oreos, and then after several nights that had built up enough confidence that they took the extra couple of steps, and that was the point that they got trapped,” Hickling says. In the control traps without Selena Gomez Oreos, they caught one possum in nine days. Once they began the “Selena Gomez regime”, they caught 15 possums in 20 days.
News of the Selena Gomez-based success soon started to spread across social media after the results of Hickling’s trial were published on Predator Free 2050’s website, and caught the attention of Ian McNeill from the Herald Island Environmental Group in Tāmaki Makaurau. The small urban island had been entirely possum free for over five years, but a handful had snuck back over from the mainland in December last year. “I could see them on the camera. In fact, I caught them mating on the camera at my home, giving me the right royal finger,” says McNeill.
He had heard about the Selena Gomez Oreos trial from a team member and, feeling “desperate”, headed down to the Hobsonville Point Woolworths, followed by the New World, in search of the popstar’s cookies. “I said to them [the staff], ‘I need these for pest control, because they’ve got a high cinnamon content’. They all just looked at me like I was crackers.” Thankfully, his partner in Kerikeri had better luck. “She rang me from the New World up there and said ‘you’re not going to believe this: there’s Oreos, there’s Selena Gomez Oreos’.”
McNeill secured 10 packets from the far north and soon got to work drilling holes to hang them inside the cage as lures. Did he ever indulge himself? “When you’re drilling through the centre you break the odd one, and it’d be a shame to waste it. They’re very tasty.” The Herald Island possums must have agreed – they quickly caught three of their four targets. “You wouldn’t believe it, they just got straight in the cage,” he says. “When it was just fruit, they didn’t show any interest at all. These biscuits really did the trick.”
A representative from Oreo told The Spinoff they are “pleased and humbled” that this popstar collaboration has found such a broad fanbase in Aotearoa. “It is a market we hadn’t considered, and I have to confess that it was a demographic, or should I say genus/genera, that we missed in our product testing and development programme,” they said. “To hear that there was zoonotic transmission of the unique taste profile is intriguing, but possibly not surprising to anyone that has a labrador and left biscuits on a table.”
Their statement also included some bad news for possum trappers across the country: stocks of the limited-edition range are dwindling. They will remain on shelves in a reduced number of stores until March, heralding “a winter of discontent for the marsupials and other Oreo Selena Gomez fans”. Moving forward, the spokesperson suggested that Predator Free NZ might consider “aural bait” such as Selena Gomez’s hit song ‘Come and Get It’. As for the star herself, Selena Gomez has not responded to repeated requests for comment.
Back on Herald Island, there is still one “very, very street-smart” possum on the run, but McNeill remains confident that his remaining supply of Selena Gomez Oreos will lure in even the most rogue of operators. He’s so confident, in fact, that he has bought another eight packets to dish out to the community leaders from the wider Upper Waitematā ecology network, including Greenhithe, Hobsonville and Paremoremo, at their next meeting at the end of February. “Some of them will perhaps think it’s a bit of a joke, but we’ll see how it works for them.”
Perhaps the most beautiful thing of all is that, in this age of celebrity brand saturation and increasingly absurd snack collaborations, McNeill admits he still doesn’t have the foggiest idea who Selena Gomez actually is. “I know she’s a woman of some popularity, but I couldn’t tell you whether she’s a dancer or a fashion or a movie or an influencer,” he says.
“I don’t know who she is, I just know she makes a good Oreo.”
