Posted on 12/16/2001 11:16:39 PM PST by jjbrouwer
SYDNEY -- Sheep farmers are being terrorized by packs of half-dingo, half-mastiff wild dogs they say roam the countryside and pose a danger to humans.
Graziers say hundreds of sheep and lambs have been killed by the so-called "superdogs", which are breeding in rugged forests and mountains in New South Wales and Victoria.
They say the dogs are so aggressive that it is only a matter of time before they attack a hiker or farmer.
Six months ago wild dingoes on Fraser Island, a holiday resort off the coast of Queensland, killed a nine-year-old boy.
The cross-bred dingoes, larger than normal dingoes, are the product of mating between the native dog and escaped domestic breeds such as Alsatians, pit bulls and bull mastiffs.
Wild dogs have thrived since national park rangers abandoned a program of dropping poisoned meat baits from planes and helicopters four years ago.
The program ended due to concerns that the baits killed tiger quolls, an endangered native animal about the size of a cat.
The number of wild dogs on the loose also has increased due to a rise in recreational hunting in the forests.
Hunters use breeds such as rottweilers and Rhodesian ridgebacks to go after wild pigs, and some of the dogs escape and interbreed with dingoes.
Angry landowners are calling for a resumption of aerial baiting, saying the dogs are becoming increasingly bold.
Farmer Stuart Morant, 50, who runs 500 sheep on a 405-hectare property in the Tallangatta Valley in Victoria, said he had lost thousands of dollars worth of livestock over the past few years.
"Aside from the financial loss, it is incredibly distressing. I walked down to one of the paddocks one morning to find a wild dog had attacked a ewe as it was giving birth to a lamb. The dog had eaten half the lamb as it was coming out of the womb, and killed the mother," Mr Morant said.
The problem has become so acute that Australia's first National Wild Dog Summit will be held in the city of Wodonga, Victoria, in February.
Farmers, politicians and national parks rangers from Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland will meet to try to resolve their differences and plan an eradication campaign.
A spokesman for the National Parks and Wildlife Service of New South Wales said:
"We sympathise with farmers. They say they are witnessing the emergence of a kind of `superdog' in the mountains. We understand how tough it is to have 200 sheep killed in a season. It's very traumatic. But the tiger quoll is a threatened species."
Sheep farmer Betty Murtagh rejected the quoll argument, saying the wild dogs killed quolls and other wildlife.
The problem started to expand exponentially when they banned the use of steel-jawed traps, on the grounds of 'animal welfare.'. Old hands at dog trapping were no longer able to surgically take out problem killers. Poison doesn't work, because why would a wily dog take a bait when there's plenty of live mutton on hand? And shooting has limited value given the huge size of farms here. So, we end up a few years later, with countless thousands of sheep torn to bits.
Yeah, animal 'welfare'......
Probably been done, but...
THE DINGO ATE MY BABY!
It's still there, albeit a thousand or so kilometres north.
The problem referenced in this piece is the growth in numbers of dogs living in the rugged mountain country along the New South Wales-Victoria border. Due to pressure from animal rights wackos, dog control programs in national parks have been put on hold for at least the last ten years. Hunting wallabies in the wet sclerophyll forests is a lot harder than pulling down a lamb in a paddock, so the dogs live on the fringe and hunt the farms now.
Correct. Not even on the Melbourne Cup.
Now, don't you have a teen porn thread to post somewhere, JJ?
Got me. But here's some pics of the dang things:
Looks like a brown possum with spots, to me.
Im sure in the spirit in which it is posted...
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