700 Sheep Taken

MERRIWA farmer Chris Kemp estimates he has lost more than 700 sheep this year due to wild dogs coming out of the National Park and the wedge tail eagles which follow them.

As we stood in his paddock discussing the issue a wedge tail flew over-head and circled a paddock with his last remaining young sheep.

A wedge-tail eagle circling a paddock of sheep on Chris Kemp’s property.

“The odd one or two don’t matter, but when you have 30 wedge tails come down what can you do?” questioned Mr Kemp.

“The wedge tails would normally follow the dingo and the dingo even if it did come out of the park to do a kill he’d never leave the tree line for very long, but now we are getting wild dogs coming 10ks with no cover and they drag the wedge tails with them and then wedge tails don’t go back again,” he said.

“A couple of months ago we had 30 wedge tails operating on one mob of ewes and lambs; and lambs that are only a few weeks old, they make fast work of them,” he said.

“The pigs came in at one stage and had a cleaned up the last that were left,” Chris Kemp said.

Local farmers say they have not seen wild dogs this prolific since the 1970’s.

At the time the land was crown land and a massive baiting program was undertaken which had a significant impact in their numbers, but now the national park have a much more limited approach and the dogs have been educated to avoid the baits.

“The management of the park have been relying on baiting, which is great to kill off young dogs, but it teaches older ones which have managed to get through a baiting program how to teach young dogs not to take the bait, so we have bred a massive generation of dogs that won’t eat baits,” said Chris Kemp.

“But they won’t admit to themselves that they have massive population of dogs that won’t take baits,” he said.

“When we had dog catching program we caught 16 dogs along the national park boarder and that tells us two things: that these are dogs which have evaded many baiting programs and they are coming out of the national park,” he said.

“If you are trying to run a national park and you’ve got it full of wild dogs all the animals you are trying to look after are all going to get eaten out.

“Some friends from Sydney came up and saw six wedge tails attack one wallaby, so imagine was is happening within the park when predators are at those levels.

“Dingos would only have one litter a year, but wild dogs have multiple litters with multiple pups,”

Chris Kemp on his property at Merriwa.

Local farmers believe the National Parks are not doing enough to address the problem.

They say they appreciate the Parks may not have the resourcing they need, but point to the financial losses they are enduring and the anguish of wondering when your sheep will be mauled.

“The way the law is if the dogs are on your property you have to control them, but they are coming out of the national park ,” said Mr Kemp.

“They need to change the way they manage, because the way they have been managing the dogs once they don’t take the bait they have no mechanism of dealing with those dogs,” Chris Kemp said.

The penalty for shooting a wedge tail eagle is in excess of $25,000, but Chris sees the root problem as the number of wild dogs and the parks being out of equilibrium.

Sheep on the Kemp’s property in Merriwa.