Selena Gomez Oreos have been found very effective in trapping possums.
Selena Gomez Oreos have been found very effective in trapping possums.
Oreos are quite a bit cheaper, and they actually stand up to the rain quite well too, which is a little disconcerting.
Sounds about as ultra processed as the TwinkieÂŽ
Iâm not saying Oreos arenât ultra processed, because obviously they are, but the ability to hold up in water is actually something UP carbs lack. Ultra processed snacks are lots of food pieces that have been âgluedâ back together with sugars or whatever, so they typically dissolve in water very easily. A piece of homemade bread on the other hand, holds up relatively well to moisture.
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. âOne of the things thatâs nice about an Oreo is that you can just drill a little hole through it and just tap it on with a flathead nail,â he says. âPeople 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.â
Mate, if you think how they hold up in the rain is disconcerting, you should have read whatâs in âemâŚ
Everything a growing boy needs.
I appreciate the sense of humor from the Oreo representative who was asked to comment on the story:
It is a market we hadnât 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
And also this
Their statement also included some bad news for possum trappers across the country: stocks of the limited-edition range are dwindling. ⌠Moving forward, the spokesperson suggested that Predator Free NZ might consider âaural baitâ such as Selena Gomezâs hit song âCome and Get Itâ.
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.â
"We wanted to try something that we could do in the field that mimicked the effect of a psychoactive drug,â Hickling explains. âAnd thatâs when I came across this psychological paper which suggested that a combination of fat and sugar was quite addictive.â That finding, combined with a US study on rats that used Oreo cookies, sent Hickling down to the local New World. âIt just so happened that they had these Selena Gomez Oreos, which I hadnât even heard of. They had both cinnamon and chocolate, which possums like, and they were on sale.â
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. âOne of the things thatâs nice about an Oreo is that you can just drill a little hole through it and just tap it on with a flathead nail,â he says. âPeople 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.â
It wasnât just the structural integrity â the possums bloody loved the âflavour-forward and horchata-inspiredâ treat. âThey would come each night, and they would take the Oreos, and then after several nights had built up enough confidence that they took the extra couple of steps, and that was the point they got trapped,â Hickling says. In the control traps without Selena Gomez Oreos, they caught one possum in nine days. Once they began the âSelena Gomez regimeâ, they caught 15 possums in 20 days.