Wild dogs are winning a battle for territory in the remote Australian bush, overrunning protected areas to attack stock behind a massive dingo fence which has defended populated areas for 100 years.
Practically invisible in the scrubby bush, the dogs are moving in as some graziers give up the fight, with Australia's sheep numbers down to their lowest in 50 years because of drought.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Sudden hot spots of wild dogs have become as great a problem for many farmers as the worst drought in a century, with attacks by native dingoes and savage crossbreeds taking out 20 percent or more of sheep flocks in some areas.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Nobody knows how many dogs are there. It could be millions.
"Many, many, many. The population has increased enormously. The big worry is they're increasing," farmer Robert Pietsch said.
Pietsch, president of the sheep and wool division of farmers group AgForce, says the dog explosion has now spread throughout Queensland and across vast distances into Western Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia.
This covers most of the barren central Outback of a country almost as big as the US.
Australia's famous dingo fence, a 180 cm-high wire mesh barrier which runs for 6,000km from central Queensland through NSW and South Australia to the Great Australian Bight, keeps most dogs on its unpopulated side.
But even this massive silent symbol of Australia's battle with its land -- a fence twice as long as the Great Wall of China -- is feeling the strain of exploding dog numbers on both of its sides.
The problem has become so great that some farmers say a poisoning, trapping and shooting campaign might need to be on such a great scale that it could make the fence irrelevant, just as work finishes on a 20-year re-building campaign.
Jerry Stanley, the Department of Natural Resources and Mines officer in charge of maintaining the Queensland section of the fence at a cost of A$1.6 million a year (US$1 million), uncomfortably defends the fence in his backyard office in Roma.
A dominant Outback man with a sweat-stained hat fixed above piercing eyes and dusty bushman's clothes, Stanley would rather be in the bush than talking about the politics of the fence.
"We've got a beautiful ... a good fence out there, an excellent fence. I believe its running at about 90-95 percent dog proof," he said. "Hot spots and people that don't bait are the problem."
But mauled sheep, their white fleece smeared red with blood, dead in fields or limping with horrifying gashes on their sides or hind quarters, are an increasing sight.
"They're driving people out of the industry. People can't stay because they'll just be eaten out," Pietsch said.
Authorities are spreading massive amounts of a poison known as 10/80, made from the foul-smelling Australian native gidgee tree. But it is not enough. Pietsch wants to form syndicates and produce strategic plans.
Stanley, who has spent the last 21 years travelling the barrier and stalking "vermin," laconically says co-ordination is needed or dogs move from one property to the next.
Old problem
This is a worsening of a dog problem which has been growing in Australia for a very long time.
Wolflike reddish-brown dogs, dingoes, were introduced to the fragile Australian ecology, probably by migrating Aborigines up to 60,000 years ago. They breed only a couple of times a year.
But increasing cross-breeding between dingoes and dogs introduced by European settlers is accelerating reproduction of wild dogs, creating large packs.
This is being accompanied by a decline of Australia's sheep flock to less than 100 million from its peak of 173 million in 1990 because of a collapse in wool prices and severe drought.
Farmers have less area to defend and less to spend on their half-share of the annual fence cost.
Meanwhile, the battle between dogs, sheep and fence is fought mostly out of sight around a construction which grew from rabbit fences built in the 1880s.
"We don't see a lot of dogs on the fence. We probably shoot 20 or 30 dogs a year. That's not a lot when you're doing three quarters of a million kilometers a year," said Stanley, whose 22 men and 12 Landcruisers cover the 2,500km fence every week.
"Dogs aren't stupid," he said.
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