COL KENNEDY and his family have 21 skins of wild dogs hanging in the woolshed at Hanworth station, 250 kilometres south-west of Sydney, ranging in fur colour from dingo to Alsatian.
"I've been saving the skins for a bit of evidence," he said.
Mr Kennedy reckons the feral dogs are at their worst in his 72 years, breeding in Sydney Water's catchment and national parks around the Wollondilly River and travelling to nearby farms to kill sheep and calves.
Bannaby, near Taralga in the foothills of the Great Dividing Range, is prime wool country where Hanworth once had a 9000-strong flock.
But this year Mr Kennedy's son-in-law, Aaren Neale, who succeeded him as manager, turned the 5000-hectare station over to cattle. He estimates the predators have cost $63,000 a year in lost lambs.
"I can't breed enough sheep to replace … They pull the tails off, chew the ears off, pull the guts out and leave them there. They don't eat that much. It's just kill, kill, kill."
At nearby Perry's Yards station, Mr Kennedy has recorded that all 190 lambs born last October were killed by dogs. He has recorded 865 kills since 1998.
This year he cut the flock from 1500 to 400. Still the dogs come. The farmers have caught four in the past month in rubber traps and know an alpha male still lurks.
A month ago, anxious landholders formed the Taralga Wild Dog Control Association with state agencies that own or manage local lands.
The NSW Farmers Association's conservation spokesman, Rod Young, said wild dogs have spread from a string of national parks and other public lands just west of the Great Dividing Range to Mudgee and Goulburn.
"If there's too many of them, they eat the wildlife, their numbers explode, so they move out onto the private land and that's when the trouble starts."
He is lobbying government landholders to increase the number of poisoned fresh meat baits dropped from helicopters along ridge-top dog trails from 10 a kilometre to 40 a kilometre.
He also wants governments to provide about $2 million to research what the minimum bait rate should be.
But Mr Neale thinks baits are cruel because dogs can take hours to die. He favours rubber traps and instant death through a shot to the head.
The president of the Taralga group, Mark Chalker, said his area needs a full-time professional dogman.
"The cunning old females will train their pups not to take baits. They are very, very smart," he said.
There are also vicious new cross-breeds. "You get a bull mastiff crossed with a dingo. It's just ready to explode."
A Department of Environment and Climate Change spokesman, Stuart Cohen, said Taralga landholders failed to report stock losses to the correct authorities, which would have immediately responded with controls and trapping.
The Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority is responsible for the 10 baits a kilometre limit, he said.
The parks service manages little land in that area, but is active in wild dog control, he said.
"The vast majority of potential wild dog habitat in the Taralga district - forested country - is in the hands of private landholders," he said.
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