Farmers take up arms as Outback goes to the dogs
Wild dogs are getting bigger and fiercer, and could devastate the Australian sheep industry if they are not stopped soon.
When the large eagles appear, wheeling high over his farm in the rich sheep country of New South Wales, Chris Kemp knows that the dogs have crept out of the wilderness to the west and are coming for his flocks.
He prepares: guns are readied, animal-activated cameras on his 2000-hectare farm are primed, and the specialist hunters are called in.
In the eyes of many farmers, including Kemp, Australia’s wild dogs are becoming bigger and more aggressive – the result of crossbreeding the native dingo with lost domestic and hunting dogs.
One of Australia’s foremost experts, Dr Ben Allen, of the University of Queensland, says the dogs are recolonising swathes of prime sheep and cattle country, from where they were eradicated more than a century ago.
He believes they will wipe out most of the sheep industry within the next few decades if they are not stopped.
In a recently published paper, Allen argues that a 40 per cent crash in sheep numbers across Australia from their peak in the late 1980s is due in large part to farmers losing their struggle against wild dog attacks.
‘‘Populations of wild dogs are definitely rising and are having dramatic impacts, essentially wiping out sheep, goats and kangaroos,’’ he said.
Kemp has lost 700 sheep, nearly a third of his flock, in almost three months. Attacks on humans are becoming more common, too.
‘They attack humans. That’s common knowledge,’’ Kemp says.
‘‘These wild dogs are very dangerous. Pure dingoes are afraid of humans, and they will normally keep out of your way. Wild dogs don’t. They’ll come for you – they don’t care.’’
In western Queensland, 1600 kilometres to the north, Belinda Coxon feels outnumbered by the wild dogs that roam her family’s sprawling farm near the Outback town of Longreach.
Her family now tries not to venture out alone to check on stock, wary of packs of up to nine wild dogs.
Pure dingoes are afraid of humans, and they will normally keep out of your way. Wild dogs don’t. They’ll come for you – they don’t care. Chris Kemp, NSW farmer
‘‘They are dangerous,’’ she says. ‘‘They’re not scared of us any more. You just feel outnumbered.’’
Two weeks ago, an elderly Aboriginal man in the Northern Territory community of Ngukurr was savaged and left bleeding by a pack of dogs.
The region’s doctor, Chris Clohesy, said he had recorded 22 dog attacks on residents over the past year.
He said that health care workers were scared to visit the Aboriginal community.
‘‘These are serious attacks, and children are being bitten on the face.’’
On the Kemp family farm, wedge-tailed eagles have become the flying harbingers of the frequent and bloody wild dog attacks on the 3000 sheep that they farm about 320km northwest of Sydney.
The family have worked the land for more than century. They say that birds of prey have learned to follow the dogs when they roam out of their homelands, a wilderness of densely timbered national park about 12km from the Kemp farm.
‘‘The eagles follow the dogs,’’ Kemp said. ‘‘The dogs will kill the sheep and the eagles will eat the sheep. But when the dogs go away, the eagles remain behind, and then they start killing.’’
The wild dogs are returning partly because sections of the famous dingo fence – a 5600km barrier that spanned much of inland Australia, dividing the tamed part of the country from the arid land where the dingoes roamed – have fallen into disrepair.
Another reason is the mechanisation of the rising number of farms owned by corporations, rather than families. There are simply fewer people on the land to keep down the wild dog numbers.
There is one gruesome sheep farming tradition that continues, however. The carcasses of shot and poisoned wild dogs and dingoes are strung from farm fences.
It is a confronting sight, intended not only to scare off the dogs but to make a silent protest to government officials, whom farmers accuse of not doing enough to stop the spread of the dogs.