Contract shooter Ozzie Dixen has more than heat and isolation to worry about — some of the animals he works to eradicate are not always afraid of guns.

"If you come up on a pack of wild dogs and fire the first shot, one of two things will happen," Mr Dixen said.

"The pack will scatter [entirely] or the pack will scatter and you'll have some attack you.

"When you've got a German shepherd-cross coming at you full bore with the intent of killing you, it certainly can be dangerous."

As well as wild dogs, Mr Dixen has had to contend with angry pigs and scrub bulls while out on the job in Queensland's outback.

"Scrub bulls are very dangerous and I've been out before where they work in pairs," Mr Dixen said.

"You might be going after one bull and the other bull will break off and come back around behind you.

"When you've got almost a tonne of beast running at you ... I'll be honest, it's very scary."

But he said even an animal trying to injure or kill him deserved a humane death.

"I don't like any animal suffering. I don't care whether they're a feral pest or not," Mr Dixen said.

"Animals only want to go about and do what they naturally do, so I see it as my job to give them a humane death where there's no suffering, or as minimal amount of suffering as possible."

'We don't live in a perfect world'

Having grown up around firearms and being taught a healthy amount of respect for their power, Mr Dixen almost fell into the profession of contract shooting.

After helping out some family friends with a feral pest problem on their property, word of his marksmanship with a rifle began to spread.

"It got to the stage where [people] were offering me money, and legally I couldn't take money under a recreational licence," Mr Dixen said.

"I thought I might as well do this as a business because the money's obviously there, I've got the offer of jobs, I've got the contracts, and it just grew from there."

Because of the nature of his business, Mr Dixen chooses not to advertise too widely.

"You'll find a lot of feral pest controllers might have a Facebook page or a website they can refer people to, but usually a lot of the details will be very limited, especially in regard to addresses and things," he said.

"Let's be honest, we don't live in a perfect world, and firearms — especially the harder to obtain special categories of firearms — are really quite an attractive item to criminals."

Per pound, per pelt, per day

How Mr Dixen is paid depends on where the job is, who he is working for and what kind of pest animal he is eradicating.

On a private property experiencing problems with wild dogs, he will usually charge per animal.

"It is fairly labour intensive, but obviously once you get a bit more experience you learn the errors of your ways and try not to walk away empty handed all the time," he said.

"[Working] somewhere like northern Queensland where there's an abundance of feral pests, you work out how many you're likely to come by for the day, make sure you cover your ammunition, fuel and time costs, and work out either an hourly rate or a daily rate."

Even with the introduction of bounties for feral pests by some Queensland councils, work continues to pour in for Mr Dixen.

"Bounties are a fantastic way for people to get involved in [feral pest management]," he said.

"Let's face it, we're all trying to reduce the annual impact that feral pests have on the Australian economy."