Farmers devastated by wild dog attacks

The Canberra Times

Shannons Flat farmer Laura Luton wants the ACT Government to work cooperatively with farmers so their enterprises are not killed off by wild dog attacks

Transcript

00:00So we're currently in Shannon's flat. This is my home. This is where I live with my

00:08husband and our two children. The farm's been in my husband's family for five

00:13generations now. Dates back to the turn of the century I suppose. We do have a

00:17problem with wild dogs. We share a boundary with the Nimadji National Park.

00:21Obviously wild dogs are protected within the National Park. They are a declared

00:27pest but they have been protected for decades. There are large swathes of

00:30country where they cannot be harmed. What's happening for us is that they are

00:34leaving the areas where they are supposed to stay. They are leaving the

00:38conservation areas and they are heading into private country where they're

00:43causing havoc for livestock producers like my family and for other families like

00:47us. That's happening in places like Thawa. So numbers vary from year to year. Just

00:53this year, this calendar year alone, we're up to 24. That's a very concerning

00:57number for us because we have de-stocked the country along the Nimadji boundary.

01:01So theoretically they should be safe where they are. The fact that they are

01:05getting hit in the locations that they're in indicates to us that there are

01:09lots of dogs and that they are moving into further into areas of private land in

01:14New South Wales. So it just boils down to cooperation. Just basic neighbours behaving

01:18like neighbours. Historically we do really well with this problem when we work

01:23together. So it's about getting the experience and the expertise of private

01:27landholders and the experience and expertise of public land managers working

01:32cooperatively and collaboratively to identify places where dingoes should be

01:37and places where dingoes shouldn't be and then you know getting traps and baits and

01:42control measures in. Unfortunately for us the ACT government has over the years

01:48declined their commitment and we're seeing spates of dog attacks coming out of the

01:53park and we're getting very little response. There's been some recent

01:58research on dogs in Nimadji. The the most current information comes from Dr.

02:03Kylie Cairns and she's saying that they are purely dingoes, that they are

02:07genetically pure dingoes. In my opinion I don't think it matters at all. I think it's

02:13about cooperating to protect an iconic dingo regardless of its DNA composition. We

02:18were forming cooperative groups to protect these animals when we thought

02:22they were hybrids. It doesn't matter. Ultimately they belong in the National Park

02:27and they don't belong on our farm.

Category

Transcript

Recommended