THE black dog at a crossroads has long been a portent of death.
Folklore paints a frightful image of the beast with slavering jaws, night-black fur and bright hellfire eyes.
And it is said, where the black dog goes death follows.
At the corner of Mt Buller Road and Buttercup Road on a warm April afternoon in High Country, half the world away from the dark and dreary pit and mill villages that conceived such nightmarish things, dogs and death go claw in claw.
The sight of the black dogs lingering there in Merrijig was accompanied by an appalling odour.
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The roadside there hums with the foul scent of death and the frenzied droning of a plague of flies that borders upon the biblical.
Five dead canines, strung up from a fence.
Behind them, the paddocks are filled with sheep.
‘Man’s best friend’ is doing his very best to turn Mansfield Shire’s sheep farmers into cat lovers.
Caught in an ongoing battle with wild dogs, the farmers say they are being made to fight with their hands tied behind their backs.
Their losses have been so dire, that some are turning their back on the ovine industry altogether.
Mansfield Shire, according to one farmer, is the perfect place to rear sheep but our community is in danger of losing touch with one of the core industries upon which it was built.
“They come at night,” Paul Diamond told the Mansfield Courier.
“They used to move as singles but now they come in twos, threes and even fours.
“They’re coming further and further out of the bush.”
Paul Diamond of Pinnaroo Pastoral has always run merinos for breeding.
In the scenic hills of the hinterlands behind Goughs Bay, his farm was filled with the bleating of thousands of sheep, ewes and lambs at pasture on some of the best grazing land that High Country has to offer.
But recent changes to the agricultural and political landscapes have ended all of that.
The ewes and the lambs are gone, their bleating silenced.
According to Mr Diamond, sheep farming simply isn’t an option anymore.
The dogs that were previously classified as unprotected have now been classified as protected, and they are running wild.
“Public land has become a sanctuary for the dogs,” he said.
“Not too long ago a hunter was rewarded with a $120 dollar bounty when they presented a wild dog’s pelt to the wild dog bounty program.”
Today, that same hunter can be fined $46,000 and face two years jail time for shooting a wild dog.
Recent research undertaken by the University of Sydney determined that the majority of dogs running wild were in fact pure breed dingos.
The 2023 study which examined tissue, blood or buccal samples from 307 wild and 84 captive dingoes from locations across Australia is not without its detractors.
Paul Diamond, a sheep and cattleman with a background in Animal and Veterinary Biosciences, questions whether the genetic markers the researchers used to identify purebred dingos have been infiltrated by feral domestic dogs, rendering the study’s findings flawed.
He points to the fact that these wild dogs can grow to thirty kilograms and that dingoes can’t.
Regardless.
Whether these wild dogs are purebred dingos, now feral once domesticated dogs, or hybrids, the decision has been made, what was unprotected is now protected and it is illegal to shoot them on public land.
And that, according to Mr Diamond, has created a safe haven in which they can breed and feed with impunity.
“The aerial culling of deer hasn’t helped,” he said.
“If a pregnant bitch comes across a culled sambar, she will stick around because she can rear a litter of pups from that one big feed.
“They shoot them from their helicopter and just leave them behind to rot.
“That’s a lot of food left lying around.”
If the boom and bust aspect of the natural world has taught us anything, where there is a constant supply of food, there is a constant supply of consumers.
When food is plentiful, consumers flourish and their numbers go up.
What happens when the steady supply of food dries up?
What happens when the bushland that the wild dogs call home is devoid of wallabies, possums, bandicoots and other wildlife?
Something Merrijig sheep and cattleman, Brendan Mahoney already believes to be the case.
He believes they have already begun widening their hunting grounds because if they don’t, they will become hungry and they will weaken and they will die.
“There’s just no food left in the bush,” Mr Mahoney said
The dogs are getting hungrier and more desperate so they’re coming further out into the open.
“They used to keep to the treeline.
“Last week one was spotted crossing Pollards Road, out in the open, no bush for several kilometres.
“They’re coming onto our farms looking for a feed and they’re finding it.
“I’ve lost 35 sheep in the last three or four weeks.
“That’s seven or eight thousand dollars - gone.
“They are costing us our livelihoods.”
Mr Mahoney is not alone in his thinking.
After losing 300 ewes and 100 lamb between December 2023 and December 2024, Paul Diamond gave up on sheep altogether, deciding instead to focus on cattle.
It would be easy to put it down to money but when Mr Diamond and Mr Mahoney speak, it’s quite clear that they have had a gutful of death.
They walk out of their houses and into their paddocks in the morning to be met by a scene more fitting of a 1980s horror film than a temperate Tuesday morning in High Country.
“They go after one sheep but it gets away so they go after another and another and another and then they get the sheep that gives them their feed,” Mr Mahoney said.
“That last sheep is eaten alive.
“The first four die slowly over the next few days after bacteria in the dogs’ saliva causes an untreatable infection.”
That, Mr Diamond says, is a shortcoming in the views of activists and academics who have pressured politicians into protecting these dogs.
“Activists think farmers are horrible people for wanting these wild dogs controlled,” he said.
“But they haven’t seen the aftermath of a wild dog attack.
“They haven’t seen the ewes and the lambs with their throats torn out or their insides chewed outside from the soft spots at their rear and pubic areas."
Mr Diamond and Mr Mahoney both agree that an apex predator at the top of the food chain is beneficial for the ecosystem but neither man believes the current number of wild dogs, or dingoes, is sustainable.
“To allow these numbers to keep growing is gross negligence and if we don’t take control, nature will,” Mr Mahoney said.
“The dogs will get hungry, they will weaken and a virus will run through them, killing them.
“We will have lost a whole lot more sheep by the time we get to that point.
“And who knows what damage they will have done beyond sheep.
“These dogs are hurting our environment, not just farmers or flocks, they’re doing damage to our environment.
“There is around 4 million acres of wilderness, forest and bush, in the Great Dividing Range and it’s overrun by dogs.”
And what, Mr Mahoney asks, is being done to protect the farmers who feed the nation, to protect their livestock and to protect native wildlife?
“Why aren’t we baiting in the bush?” he asked.
“Why are we waiting until they are out in the open and it’s too late?
“The Labor government has watered down the control measures over the last six years.
“Measures that have been in place for 100 years.
“The dogs have free reign in the bush and they are just living to eat and to breed and to eat until there is nothing left.”
“They just did $31m worth of baiting of wild dogs and foxes in the Barry Mountains to protect the potoroos,” he said.
“Who’s baiting to protect the koala population on the great dividing range?”
Mr Diamond suggested that while the government trapper is sympathetic towards the plight of sheep and cattlemen in High Country and beyond, their hands are tied by changes to regulations.
“He used to set 80 traps when he went out trapping,” Mr Diamond said.
“Now he can only set 20 and it’s just not enough.
“It’s disheartening that the government has made sheep farming impossible in the best sheep farming country you could hope to find.”
While Mr Diamond’s shift towards cattle diminishes the threat of wild dogs, it doesn’t eradicate it.
“Calves could be a concern,” he said.
“I’ve lost alpacas to wild dogs.
“People will lose domestic dogs to wild dogs.
“I think it’s only a matter of time before a child is attacked near a campground.”
“Dingoes are anti-social by nature and they keep their distance, they are more inclined to stick within the bush.
“But these hybrids aren’t as shy, it’s the domestic dog in them.
“They will come out into the open and they will come onto farms and onto campgrounds and that will bring them face to face with livestock and humans.”
While Brendon Mahoney’s fears for a future in which the wild dog situation is left unchecked are just as stark, they differ in how they manifest.
“The dogs are getting hungrier and the farmers are getting more desperate.
“This wild dog problem is 100% a political problem.
“Agricultural minister after agricultural minister have come from backgrounds with no experience in farming so they do nothing to make life easier for the farmers.”
What can be done?
Something needs to be done.
Have a story about wild dogs in Mansfield Shire or a view on how they should be controlled?
Contact edit.mcourier@nemedia.com.au and let us know.
