A petition calling for the reintroduction of a wild dog scalp fee in the Dalrymple shire is gaining traction among landowners who say numbers are swelling around the region.
Novice trapper Riley Saunders said while he was tiling a house in Greenvale recently he overheard the homeowners talking about their wild dog problem.
“I offered to trap while I was working on the house. Over five afternoons I buried 50 traps and in the five weeks I was tiling I got 62 dogs on the 80,000 acre property,” Mr Saunders said.
“This is an extremely alarming number on a block that baits twice a year,” he said.
“Their are pockets of them everywhere, some places are fine while others are loaded with them.”
“There is a petition going around the shire to bring back a scalp fee which might encourage farmers to dig out their old traps and get stuck into the plague of dogs running rife through the region.
He said some farmers are paying for and placing traps themselves which “takes some time to do”.
“I think they should be getting some some coin for their efforts, as what they’re doing is helping out everyone in the region.”
He said trapping would give council a good indication on sex ,size, maturity, breeds and numbers as the data be obtained from scalp dna.
Ray White Rural livestock agent Kevin Currie said reintroducing a scalp fee would have to be made worthwhile for trappers.
“About 20 years ago all shires had scalping fees but that number has been reduced by around half in western Queensland in the intervening years,” Mr Currie said.
“To get anyone to trap a dog, scalp it, dry the scalp and bring it into council, they’d need to be offering at least $50 per scalp to make it worth their time,” he said.
AgForce North (West) Regional Manager Dominic Burden said the council is supportive of programs that help maintain wild dog numbers, but if a scalp fee was brought back it’d have to be a coordinated operation across shire boundaries.
“For it to work effectively, scalp values would have to be set at a even dollar amount across the shires, otherwise as we’ve seen in the past the system will be rorted,” Mr Burden said.
Charters Towers Regional Council deputy mayor Sonia Bennetto said the petition hadn’t been put to council at the time of going to press, though a scalp fee is an option that will be back on the table at some stage.
“I’ve spoken to several graziers around the region and they said they’ve been monitoring wild dog numbers, but they don’t think there has been a huge increase in numbers,” Cr Bennetto said.
“We’ll be doing a review of the Biosecurity Act soon, so we’ll have a better idea of how we’ll be managing the wild dog situation after that,” she said.
CTRC conducts a wild dog baiting program throughout the entire region every six months targeting adults during breeding season (April/May) and pups and juveniles (September/October).
“We think the next round of controlled baiting will help keep wild dog numbers under control.”
