Sunshine Coast Hinterland Times

DINGOES AND domestic dogs gone wild have long been the bane of Australian graziers. For many landholders, the creation of the sprawling dingo fence from South Australia to Queensland kept wild dogs away from their livestock. But now experts are warning that there are growing numbers of dogs within the barrier fence, causing more than $60 million in stock losses in Queensland alone every year.

On ABC Television recently, a spokesman for the National Wild Dog Advisory Committee, said there are dingo and wild dogs up and down the Queensland coast and hinterland that are 20 times worse than they are in western Queensland. The Hinterland Times tracked down a well respected trapper from Nambour, John Wilson, who has first-hand experience of the dingo problem. “These days our purebred dingo is fast disappearing and crossbreeds are taking over”, says John. “This change has been happening over the past one hundred years and the domestic dog is now showing up. They have been called wild dogs, because the colours are the same as your average domestic dog. In my estimation there will not be a pure bred dingo on the mainland in fifty years. “

John Wilson caught his first dingo when he was eight years old. Then he learnt trapping skills by watching and listening to old trappers during droving days, and working on stations in western Queensland. He worked along the Barrier Fence in the 1970s catching 200 dingoes every winter – half of them bitches producing a litter of 5-7 pups each year. “One time I had 2,500 lambs in one lambing. When I brought them in for shearing there were 2,000. Dingoes were the cause. In the end I had to trap to save my own sheep. I got a bonus each year from the company – 200 pounds – for my trapping work on weekends.

“When I was out there trapping one dingo had been across four properties – thousands of acres – and it had killed 800 sheep in 15 months. I set a trap on top of a mulga ridge near a dam. I put a few concoctions at the head of the trap and one was lipstick. Anyway, we caught this huge dog and the property owner was so angry that he emptied his rifle into it. I got $400 in cash for catching that dog. “You can understand the owner’s anger because the wild dog or dingo has a savage bite, and believe me these attacks on sheep and cattle are horrifying. Often, much of the flesh and skin is missing, legs can be broken, ears and noses have been bitten off. Most dingoes work in pairs. What is most upsetting is that some of these unfortunate animals are still alive. And most would have to be put down.”

Queensland rural lobby group AgForce recently estimated that wild dogs are costing the state’s grazing industry almost $70 million a year in dead animals. What also concerns trappers like John Wilson is the increase of dingoes and feral domestic dogs in regional and semi urban areas. The Sunshine Coast Council claims they caught or baited 1,000 dogs last year. John’s concern is at the crossbreeding of dingoes with domestic dogs that remain in Hinterland areas. “The half breeds are more game and they live closer to towns. I have seen mongrels come from greyhounds, fox terriers, alsatians and blue cattle dogs. I once caught nine dogs that were black and white in colour. They could have been someone’s collie, but they were crossbreds – some mongrel dog from town had got out with the dingo. “You get a bounty for the scalp – that’s for the whole skin from the nose to the tail. You can get $100, up to $4-500 for a dog scalp in sheep country. “Landholders often want to know what the dingo is eating.

It is often a surprise to see what they actually have in their stomachs. The dingo eats very little of what it kills. It has a good diet. I have done many autopsies and their stomachs are full of small animals – grasshoppers, beetles, little fish and crustaceans that they find as they hunt along the creeks and gullies.” After several decades trapping John still gets requests to trap foxes and dogs around the Sunshine Coast.

And John has a fund of stories and bulging photo albums to reminisce about the trapping life as it was in the old days. “Thirty-five years ago at Dulong – every evening the farmers are out milking and there’s wild dogs running across the top of the hill. One farmer said to me, ‘if you can catch them I’ll give you 25 pounds a dog. That was good money as far as I was concerned. It bought something in those days. Now it’s all houses in Dulong.”