Australian farmers are locked into a never-ending crusade against malicious wildlife invaders who represent a nagging problem.

Amid the list of feral threats to farming stocks, wild dogs remain the most frightening due to their brazen behaviour that often takes the form of vicious attacks on livestock.

The carnage inflicted by the canine marauders can cause consternation amid the agricultural community, who continually strive to counteract the damage.

The prime agricultural woe from the antics of wild dogs is stock losses. Carefree molestations cause an average 1900 sheep deaths annually across Australia. Sheep are the main farm animals targeted by these brutal intruders, with cattle and goats also victims.

Sometimes dogs will chase an animal without killing it, which can cause stress that results in mismothering and the loss of production. Total economic disturbance must also take the loss of potential genetic gain into the equation, alongside the deflection of resources away from farm activities to control the ever-present threat.

Wild dogs are now reckoned to cost agriculture $89 million a year. However, National Wild Dog Management Coordinator Greg Mifsud, who is based in Toowoomba, insists the overall picture is not as bleak as it is sometimes painted out to be.

Greg cited the work done under the banner of the National Wild Dog Action Plan which sets out to promote and support community driven action for landscape-scale wild dog management.The Plan focuses on a five-year timespan with its program managed by Wild Dog Management Projects Stages 1 (2014-2015), 2 (2015-2017) and 3 (2017-2019). These projects are funded by the Australian Government with Stage 2 receiving extra funding from the Western Australian Government. They are also backed up by livestock producers, their representative organisations, researchers, government agencies and other organisations that give their time to further these projects.

“There are programs in place where the dog problem is being well and truly managed,” said Greg.

“We have had great success in Victoria. The situation there is one of the best. We are winning a few battles in Victoria. There are examples of farmers who have not had dog attacks for about two and half years.

“In New England too, we are enjoying success.”

Greg is aware that the wild dog predicament is an ongoing battle but laments some of the overblown coverage in the media.

“Some newspaper reports tend to paint a sensationalist picture of what is actually happening,” he said.

“It is an emotive space. Of all the pest animals, wild dogs are the ones who provoke the most reactions.

“A fox may kill a few lambs but wild dogs will kill just about anything.”

And Greg reckons the onus is on farmers to help themselves to curb the menace of the predators.

“Farmers need to work collectively with their neighbours and sometimes this is hard to do.

“If the farmers are not part of a group working together they can feel quite isolated.

“We need to identify control techniques to be cost effective and target specific.”

Greg was pleased that some Sporting Shooters’ Association of Australia members had joined the fight by volunteering their services as shooters. But shooting by itself cannot be the solution.

“Shooters help but they cannot solve the problem alone. There needs to be baiting, trapping and shooting techniques on a reasonable scale,” said Greg.

“We need to use shooting strategically as an action plan.”

Wild dogs can also have the potential to affect human health. All dogs can carry a parasite called the hydatid tapeworm (Echinococcus granulosus), which has the capability to cause fatality in humans.

Greg said there were elements of hybridisation between dingoes and domestic dogs that had turned feral after being abandoned in the countryside.

Dingoes have their origins in Asia where they were on the prowl as many as 10,000 to 14,000 years ago and were stemmed from wolves. Aboriginal people are said to have ushered in the dingo to Australia approximately 4000 years ago. However, the dingo never made it as far as Tasmania. Domestic dogs were brought into Australia when the First Fleet arrived and their often-muddled discharge into the wild has gone on ever since. Both dingoes and wild domestic dogs are the same species, Canis familiaris.

As the years went by, their rising nuisance value was enough to prompt authorities into drastic measures. One of these steps was to build the Dog Fence. This construction is a long fence that stretches from Jimbour on the Darling Downs near Dalby through thousands of kilometres of parched tracts ending west of the Eyre Peninsula on the cliffs of the Nullarbor Plain. The fence was built in the early 1900s to deter dingoes or wild dogs from incurring into the relatively lush south-east part of the continent where sheep and cattle were foraging. Clocking up 5614 kilometres, it is one of the longest structures in the world.

The fence was originally built in the 1880s by state governments, to stop the spread of the rabbit plague across state borders. The fences fell into disrepair until the early 1900s when they were upgraded with the intention of blocking the dingoes and safeguarding the sheep flocks. In 1930, an estimated 32,000km of dog netting in Queensland alone was being used on top of rabbit fences. In the 1940s, the fences were joined together to form one uninterrupted appliance, which was logged as the longest fence in the world.

There are no perimeters to where the wild dogs will roam. They are found across NSW, but the eastern ranges, the coastal hinterland and tablelands have the highest numbers. Increasingly, wild dogs are gravitating nearer to towns where they intermingle with local dogs and can become mistaken as ‘strays’. The wild dog is highly adaptable and may live successfully in arid to rainforest environments, providing there is an adequate supply of food, water and shelter.

Victoria has two main zones of wild dog involvement. In the east of the state, wild dogs are active in the heavily timbered tracts of the Eastern Highlands from the NSW border in the north and to the Healesville and Gembrook areas in the south. The north-west of the state has another population of wild dogs in the Big Desert region.

Despite the seemingly random and widespread nature of the wild dog scourge, Greg is adamant that a communal approach can reap its rewards.

Controlling wild dogs necessitates coordination, cooperation and planning. Adopting a community attitude has proved to be the only way to provide a long-term solution to wild dog problems.

Wild dog management lines of action are most telling when people work together. Pulling together ensures that all stakeholders enjoy participation in a management outlook that covers the views of each interest group. This as a rule requires a small input of work from a lot of people, rather than a lot of work from a few people.

“It’s true that the dogs are a constant threat,” said Greg. “But so long as we don’t take our foot off the accelerator in the areas where we have had success, we will be rewarded for our efforts.”