Blackall mustering contractor Brady Prow shot a wild dog with three legs on the outskirts of Blackall last week.
Brady was on his way home from a job when he spotted the dog having a drink on a dam.
“He might have only had three legs but he could run pretty good,” Brady said, adding that he was in good order and obviously able to feed himself despite his disability.
The dog is one of a hundred or so that Brady has shot so far this year in the Blackall and Windorah districts, and he said it was probably the third he’d seen with part of a limb missing.
The other two were in the Adavale district.
Because the leg had been lost high up, Brady speculated that perhaps he’d been shot at before.
Fellow Blackall wild dog hunter, Kipley Hafey said he’d seen one three-toed dog in the 4000 or so he’d shot over the years, but he had experienced dogs chewing their leg off to escape a trap.
He said maybe the one shot last week by Brady had lost its leg from being caught up in a fence.
“I’ve never tracked one like that, and I look at the ground a lot,” he said.
Brady said there were plenty of young pups on the move in the Blackall region.
“I shot about 200 last year, and they’re out there doing plenty of damage at the moment,” he said.
Despite the cluster fences going up across the landscape, he’d still like to see bounties increased to encourage kangaroo harvesters to shoot the wild dogs they come across.