In the bush, wild dogs are now mythical creatures. They're called "hypercarnivores", and they're supposedly getting bigger, nastier, smarter.
Benambra, Vic, farmer Lou Pendergast says he has lost 45 lambs in the last few months.
"The day will come soon when a wild dog will attack someone, for sure."
Nobody likes wild dogs — they cost farmers in eastern Victoria alone $1.5 million in lost stock each year and often leave sheep mauled, but alive and in terrible pain.
But according to the RSPCA's Dr Hugh Wirth, "two sets of cruelty do not make a right".
In Victoria, the Government pays for 720 traps to be set each day.
The type the government "doggers" use, a leg-hold trap, is banned in 80 countries, including Britain, because they are considered inhumane.
When a dog wanders into the trap, a piece of padded steel clamps down on a paw or a leg.
One in three times, a native animal is snared instead, most often wallabies and wombats.
The trapped animals can stay like that, writhing and yelping in pain, for three days before a dogger arrives to shoot them, if they are not already dead.
The Victorian Government, under pressure from rural communities to "do something" about the thousands of roaming wild dogs, has chosen a different path to every other state.
A national push to reduce the dogs' suffering is being resisted here.
Every other state checks wild dog traps daily or laces them with lethal poison to ensure a quick death. Victoria does not.
A recent Government-commissioned report chronicled the obvious: the dogs suffer chronic pain, acute trauma, fear, lacerations and broken bones, self-mutilation, starvation and dehydration.
Many die horrible deaths before they're found and destroyed.
The Brumby Government recently released a draft of new prevention-of-animal-cruelty regulations, including the use of traps.
The RSPCA, which says Victoria's wild dog practices are the worst in the nation, concedes the draft is an improvement, with limits on the size of traps and an insistence that the traps' steel jaws must be padded.
But the Government won't budge on how frequently trappers are required to check traps to minimise the suffering of the hundreds of native animals and 1000 dogs caught in them each year.
Under a new national code being developed, other Australian states and territories are pushing Victoria to agree to daily trap checks.
But the Government has resisted, saying it is "impractical or excessively costly" because traps are often set in remote areas (as they are in other states and territories).
Victoria's draft law, therefore, allows the minister to exempt trappers from this requirement.
The RSPCA says this is "totally unacceptable".
Chief scientist Bidda Jones says wild dogs suffer the same way pet dogs suffer.
"They are the same animal, with the same intelligence and capacity to suffer," Dr Jones said.
"It is hard to imagine the level of frustration, pain and distress endured by a dog captured in a trap for days on end.
"It is not the dog's fault that they are treated as pests."
In the bush, there is little sympathy.
Gippsland East independent MP Craig Ingram sums up the sentiment: "If you stick it on the scales, I know which is the issue that least weighs on my conscience.
"So be it if a dog is in a trap for 24 hours or 48 hours.
"I can sleep very soundly with that, knowing the damage they do to domestic stock and wildlife."
Dog attacks take an emotional and economic toll on farmers greeted each morning by the sight of "sheep ripped apart with their guts and entrails torn out".
Mr Ingram says he would even support a return of the unpadded steel-jawed traps.
The Government has sided with the farmers because it knows the wild dog issue could quickly develop into a political sore.
In the bush, the dogs living in state-run national parks and Crown bushland are seen as "the Government's dogs".
A former Department of Sustainability and Environment worker, who was close to East Gippsland's wild dog program, said: "The view (of some bureaucrats) is that these dogs are cruel to sheep and cattle and so our cruelty to them is justified.
"It may not stand up to any logical scrutiny, but it is not under scrutiny … People are not in the back blocks of Tallangatta and Benambra looking at a dog that has been in a trap for two days — the only witnesses are the dog man and the dog."
Victoria is the only state using leg-hold traps for wild dog control that are not laced with lethal poison.
While the RSPCA does not endorse the traps, it does believe that a caught animal's suffering is so great it would be better if the trap is treated with poison so the animal dies quickly.
One of Australia's leading experts on pest animal control, the Queensland Government's Dr Lee Allen, said a dog should not be left in a trap for more than a day.
"If you are not checking them daily, the trap has to be poisoned (so the animal is killed quickly)."
He said he would expect the RSPCA to prosecute a person in Queensland if they set a trap and did not check it every day.
But the Victorian Government refuses to set traps laced with strychnine because it considers poison inhumane.
The Department of Primary Industry, which refused to allow its staff to be interviewed for this article, said in an email that it intends to use lethal traps, possibly with a more humane poison, but it has not done so.
Victorian scientist Clive Marks, who has worked for the department, developed traps in 1990 that send signals to the "dogger" when the trap is triggered.
In 2006, he created a device that delivers poison to trapped dogs.
The department has not implemented either innovation.
Agriculture Minister Joe Helper declined to be interviewed.
His spokesman, Matthew Hillard, said: "The Brumby Government believes that wild dog traps should be used in the most effective and humane way possible, but we are acutely aware of the threat wild dogs pose to other animals, especially in rural areas."
There is no clear evidence that dog traps reduce the number of sheep killed by wild dogs, unlike other measures, particularly fencing.
The State Government could provide no scientific evidence that its trapping program cut attacks.
Most experts agree trapping is useful to stop dogs continuing a killing spree after an attack.
But Victoria also does widespread preventative trapping in areas around farmland.
Research has been mounting that baiting and trapping, by breaking up the social structure of wild dog packs, can actually stimulate their dispersal, spur breeding and encourage the hunting of sheep (when younger dogs, forced out of packs, go for the easy prey of lambs and sheep).
Probably the most well-recognised way to stop wild dog attacks is to build electric fences to separate the hunter from the hunted.
But, of course that's expensive.
Then again, Victoria's wild dog trapping program costs taxpayers $1.6 million annually.
At $1600 for every dog caught, that's pretty pricey too.
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