Page:Ashburton•Scotter•1972.pdf/46
Ashburton
station. The first of these was John Hayhurst, later prominent in South Canterbury. The second was Thomas Carter Moorhouse, a younger brother of William Sefton Moorhouse, the second superintendent of Canterbury. ‘Tom’ Moorhouse had previously been in partnership with his brother, ‘Dr. Ben’, on Shepherds Bush run. A description of the latter will serve for them both:
Moore ran cattle only on Wakanui until 1861, when he sent 5000 sheep south from Glenmark. Soon there were complaints that his sheep were infecting the neighbouring flocks. Finally, Moorhouse took Moore to court in an action for £7000 damages because of the losses and expenses caused by the scab introduced by trespassing Wakanui animals. The long trial was one of the most important in early Canterbury history, as it established the principle in New Zealand—as had already been done in Australia—that ‘if a man persists in keeping flocks of scabby sheep and spreading infection on all sides, he is liable for all the damage his neighbours may suffer.’[2] The jury awarded Moorhouse £2000, which was a life-time’s wages for a farm hand and more than the capital of many a sheepfarmer. But the opinion of the Press[3] that ‘To this class of squatters a great lesson has been read which they are not likely to forget’ was over-optimistic. Moore continued to offend.
In the court Moorhouse claimed that he was unable to use one-third of his run because of the need to hold his sheep away from the eastern boundary, that the constant yarding and restrictions on his sheep resulted in a serious decline in lambing from his 3500 breeding ewes (700 lambs instead of the expected 2450), and that his wool clip had declined by one-third. He needed to employ three shepherds—James Bland and his sons—instead of one, and the cost of dipping his flock five times had amounted to £750 for materials and £1000 for labour. Moore’s evidence showed that within two years of his sending the first sheep south, he was pasturing 15,000 adult animals and 3000 lambs between the Wakanui Creek and the Ashburton River. There were few more on any Ashburton station at the time. P. B. Boulton, the chief sheep inspector, reported that he had examined 14,000 of these