Authorities and residents in the northern NSW Tweed region are worried wild dogs could take a small child, if programs to control their numbers are not ramped up.

Senior biosecurity officer with the North Coast Local Land Service Tony Heffernan said the dogs were becoming more brazen as they got used to being around people.

A calf attacked by a wild dog survives despite its injuries ( Supplied: Glenda Bowkett )

"I worry about that, I have been on properties where they have had small pet dogs taken on the edge of the backyard and houses, where there have been young children there as well," senior biosecurity officer Tony Heffernan said.

Glenda Bowkett agists cattle near Murwillumbah and lives in the fast-growing urban area on the Tweed coast where they also regularly see wild dogs.

"The neighbour across the road came down the other afternoon and my daughter was home and she said there was a wild dog sitting at the end of our road and she was very intimidated by it," Ms Bowkett said.



"I've had calves killed.

"So it is only a matter of time, I feel, before a person is attacked; it's not just the domestic animals being attacked at the moment."

The Kingscliff resident said she could hear wild dogs howling at night.

"Actually it is really quite eerie when you hear it, and you will hear one dog on one ridge, and you'll hear a dog on the other ridge respond. It is a common sound now to hear at night," Ms Bowkett said.

Dingo hybrid dogs

A wild dog lurks on the urban fringe at Tweed Heads ( Supplied: Glenda Bowkett )

The dogs are a hybrid breed of dingo and domestic dog, developed over decades of living on the fringes of New South Wales North Coast communities.

"DNA testing has shown there is dingo in some of these dogs," Mr Heffernan said.

"They are raising their pups, and they are raising more pups.

"It comes from the way they have evolved over the last 30 years, where they have nearly become a distinctive breed of dog that is out there."

Mr Heffernan said the dogs killed for sport when they were raising their young.

"I had a guy give me a call a year or two ago who lost 20 out of 20 sheep over two nights and there wasn't very much of them eaten — they were just killed for sport, strewn around the paddock," he said.

Control measures

There are three main options to control wild dogs: baiting, trapping and shooting, each with rules and restrictions.

Mr Heffernan said it was harder to implement control measures in the urban fringe because of strict rules around baiting buffer zones.

The fear was that someone's pet dog could eat a 1080 bait by accident.

"The dogs are doing what dogs do and we as people, we're a bit smarter than that, we've got to band together, pull together as a community with this problem," he said.

Mr Heffernan said landholders needed to start coordinating dog baiting and trapping programs with their neighbours, as trapping would not work unless it was done across multiple properties.

"Dogs have territory they roam around in, so there is no point in just trying to get rid of that problem on one particular property," he said.

"It would be lovely to think there is a golden answer out there to eradicate the problem, but unfortunately I think those days are gone."

Mr Heffernan said the North Coast Local Land Service offered training for baiting programs.