Rick Keogh: This is a shoulder attack on one of the young rams which has virtually rendered him unsaleable. We have given him a shot of penicillin and dressed him so the flies don't eat him alive, but you can see the trauma, that's just one bite.

Ian Townsend: So they've taken a chunk of flesh out…

Rick Keogh: Yep, pretty much.

Ian Townsend: …of his shoulder there, and it's oozing, but he'll survive?

Rick Keogh: He'll survive, this bloke, but he won't be any good for anything.

Ian Townsend: A plague of dingoes is tearing apart the remnants of Queensland's wool industry. Already the vast sheep stations of central western Queensland and their millions of sheep are gone.

Rick Keogh is one of the last graziers running sheep around Blackall, 1,000 kilometres west of Brisbane. He's just finished mustering his young rams, and about 60 are missing—eaten, he says, by wild dogs.

Rick Keogh: They take great chunks out of their back legs, just get a sheep, chase it till it drops and then they eat the kidney out of it and just leave it to die. Some of them take two or three days to die. They're one of the only animals that doesn't actually kill its prey, they eat it alive. It's just distressing to talk about it, Ian.

Ian Townsend: Hello, I'm Ian Townsend, welcome to Background Briefing on RN.

For decades the frontline in a war on dingoes has been a 5,000-kilometre-long dog-proof fence and a poison called 1080. Both the fence and 1080 have failed to hold them back, and the dingoes from Queensland are starting to spill down through Australia's eastern sheep belt.

Don Sallway is a dingo hunter, a 'dogger', in western Queensland.

Don Sallway: In the last three years, Ian, the numbers have really ballooned, I don't know where they're coming from, but you used to get singles and then you're getting doubles and the numbers have just sort of blown. Like I picked up 178 dogs in nine weeks a little while back in country that only I was getting 60 in before. They are going to be a really major problem for the grazing industry as a whole.

Ian Townsend: After three good seasons there's been an explosion in wildlife, including dingoes, but as drought returns and the native prey vanishes, the dingoes will get hungrier.

Queensland's wool industry has already taken a beating. Since 1990, the number of sheep shorn in Queensland has crashed 92%, from over 21 million to less than 2 million. In central western Queensland alone, half a million sheep have vanished in three years. There have been low wool prices and droughts, but speak to graziers like Rick Keogh, and it's the wave after wave of dingoes that's finally forced everyone out of sheep.

Rick Keogh: Well, I akin it to a natural disaster. People talk about fires and floods which happen overnight or over a couple of days, and this is an incremental disaster but a disaster nonetheless. It's taken probably seven or eight years, it's taking huge chunks out of people's income, but more importantly the emotional side of it is devastating.

Ian Townsend: It's a disaster that's bitten deep into the livelihood of outback towns such as Aramac, Barcaldine, Muttaburra, Blackall and Tambo. The mayor of the Blackall-Tambo Regional Council is Barry Muir.

Barry Muir: The wool industry has actually been the thing that has nurtured the various towns out in these areas, and without it we're not doing too well.

Ian Townsend: Do you blame the dogs?

Barry Muir: I do, I do, yes, and I think a lot of other people would do too.

Ian Townsend: Lots of rural towns have been in decline, but Blackall's losing its heart. The town was the centre of wool empires, but today the road trains rumbling down the main street are all carrying cattle.

We've got a road train going past; cattle or sheep?

Barry Muir: Well no, that's definitely cattle, there are only two tiers there, definitely cattle. You do see sheep coming through but it's a bit of a rarity.

Ian Townsend: In the centre of town is statue to the gun shearer Jackie Howe, but the sheep have gone, and so has half the town's population, the shearers and farm hands.

On a late Friday afternoon, Blackall's main street is quiet except for the rumble of road trains and the caravans of grey nomads. Mayor Barry Muir:

Barry Muir: With fewer people in the town there's less kids at school, it's an ageing population, you know, we have got a very, very good retirement village here and aged care facility.

Ian Townsend: We're in the main street of Blackall at the moment, it's pretty quiet for a Friday afternoon. I notice Seymour's over there looks pretty empty.

Barry Muir: It's closed, yes. Max finished up last year about November or early December, and…

Ian Townsend: That was the local department store?

Barry Muir: It was and a very good one too. They lived behind and it's an excellent store. And the Autopro over here, it's closed. So where you went and got parts and things for a car, just walked in and got it, well now you've really got to think because now you've got to ring up somewhere, either Longreach or go online or do something, and it's just not the same. This is the effects, it sets a depression. There's no sort of light in the distance, so to speak, it just becomes a dim light.

Ian Townsend: Since the wool price crashed in the early 1990s, the industry's been declining. Wool's always been at the mercy of prices and the weather, but sheep are also labour intensive. Cattle don't need as much attention. Running sheep, though, has always been more profitable around here. The reason this prime sheep country has switched almost entirely to cattle, is dingoes.

Those road trains rolling south through Blackall are part of a mass evacuation of cattle. A third of Queensland is already drought declared. When all the grass is gone, there's nothing left for the cattle to eat. Sheep are tougher, but when the drought starts to bite, those last sheep flocks will be surrounded by a sea of hungry dingoes.

It's already bad enough.

South of Blackall, Rick and Jenny Keogh run 5,000 stud sheep on their property Amaroo. The wild dogs aren't just taking a financial toll. In the homestead kitchen, Jenny Keogh explains the emotional damage of the attacks.

Jenny Keogh: The men are just so emotional about it, and I think unless you are living it, it's hard even for our people like AgForce and those sort of people to understand what we're going through because they're not living it and you don't understand until you're living it. It's like going to war, you think, oh poor things, but you just…and I know that it's not fair to make that simile, but it is absolutely true. And I don't think our communities even in our towns have really understood. We go to town and we talk about it but they're not going out seeing the little white dots all through the paddock which are dead lambs that are left. We go to town and talk about it but it's just talk. So you've got to live it, you know.

Ian Townsend: Most of the sheep graziers around here would be traumatised by what's happened.

Jenny Keogh: Absolutely traumatised.

Ian Townsend: In recent years, the Keoghs have spent a small fortune trying to keep the wild dogs away from their sheep. As the attacks increased, Jenny Keogh started wondering what had gone wrong.

Jenny Keogh: I started to do some research because I was getting really frustrated about our management and we weren't getting anywhere and spending a lot of money for no benefit. That's when I found out about the repositioning of the barrier fence and then it all just sort of started to make sense to me what had happened, and it's just been like a slow bleeding of people out of the sheep industry from ever since then.

Ian Townsend: She's talking about the wild dog barrier fence that runs from the Darling Downs to the Great Australian Bight. A northern loop in the fence once protected central western Queensland.

After the introduction 40 or so years ago of a poison called sodium fluoroacetate, commonly known as 1080, the northern loop of the dog fence was neglected and eventually fell apart.

Here's a report on ABC radio's AM program from 1981:

Journalist [archival]: In its heyday the dingo fence wound its way some 6,000 kilometres across the New South Wales border into outback Queensland and was said to rival the Great Wall of China as man's longest structural achievement. Built to keep dingoes out of sheep and cattle country, the fence eventually fell into disrepair. Now the Queensland government says it can't afford the upkeep and prefers a dingo baiting campaign using 1080 poison. Lands Minister Bill Glasson says the poison is selective and will be well supervised.

Ian Townsend: The main stretch of barrier fence later made a comeback, but that northern loop was abandoned and so were hundreds of kilometres of dog-proof fences on farms. 1080 poison was to be the new barrier against the dingo, and the policy was made to make communities responsible for protecting their livestock with co-ordinated baiting. While everyone was still in sheep, they were happy to bait, but in the 1990s graziers started turning to cattle and that co-operation broke down. Rick Keogh:

Rick Keogh: The introduction of 1080 poison was a revolution in wild dog control, and 1080 was like an antibiotic, it seemed to cure it all and it worked really well, it was totally efficient. But over the years it's slowly lost its effectiveness through complacency about how much country is baited. And now that all the fences have fallen down and the dogs have integrated into the open downs country, you just cannot get a good run at them to knock them down, it's really hard to control them with 1080.

Ian Townsend: The Invasive Animals Cooperative Research Centre says it's because of that patchwork approach to baiting that the dogs are now out of control. The CRC's national wild dog facilitator is Greg Mifsud.

Greg Mifsud: I think the biggest issue we've got now is that we don't have enough people using 1080 across the landscape. So you conduct a control program on a couple of properties only to find out that there's a massive property nearby that doesn't do it. So I don't think it's an issue with the control tool or the toxin itself, it's more about the delivery of it and the fact that we just haven't had the participation in control programs that we used to have. So of course we've always got dogs in the landscape, whereas before, a dog couldn't go on any property without running into a bait or some other form of control or a fence and couldn't go any further.

Ian Townsend: But a lot of people believe 1080 has lost its edge. Terry Brennan breeds cattle on the eastern side of Blackall.

Terry Brennan: There are people who are firm believers that 1080 works but there is also another school that says it doesn't work, that even their arguing that the dingoes are getting used to it, they're getting smarter, the dingoes don't actually pick up baits. I've heard a story of actually someone I know who was observing a dingo come up to a dam and it was actually educating the pups to avoid the baits. So they've got smarter, if that makes any sense.

Ian Townsend: Dingoes are highly intelligent, but Background Briefing's been unable to establish whether they're actually teaching each other to avoid baits. But something has gone terribly wrong, because wild dogs have never before done so much damage.

Brent Finlay is chairman of QDOG, a group that advises the Queensland government on how best to deal with wild dogs.

Brent Finlay: I think the key emphasis of policy around wild dogs has been about coordination and trying to bring established landholder groups, them also with public lands operators, work them with local government, work local governments together across regions, and we try to build that mosaic across the state, working with the sheep industry, the beef industry as well. It's important, but then we still have gaps. Some areas it does work.

Ian Townsend: Well, it doesn't, it hasn't worked, has it. Surely something's gone wrong?

Brent Finlay: Again it comes back to participation and why landholders don't see that it is a significant economic problem in their business. AgForce did a survey four years ago, it come up with about $67 million impact to the sheep and cattle industries. I'd suggest if we did that survey now it could be two or three times bigger.

Ian Townsend: The sheep industry, the sheep people out there, the wool people in that central western area are well aware, aren't they, of the economic impacts. It's come to the stage where it's going to wipe out the wool industry in that area.

Brent Finlay: Unless you can actually secure your boundaries or secure your region, the potential is there that it will wipe that industry out.

Ian Townsend: The Queensland Government recently pumped $700,000 into community education campaigns, but it's hard to persuade everyone that dingoes are their enemy. For a start there's confusion about their status. Dingoes are protected native species in national parks but the law says they have to be killed as vermin on private land.

DNA studies show that most dingoes now have some domestic dog genes, but it varies across the country and no-one's been able to say at what genetic point a dingo is no longer a dingo. The terms 'dingo' and 'wild dog' are used almost randomly.

In any case, Queensland's Land Protection Act requires landholders to take reasonable steps to kill them all. Brent Finlay from the advisory group QDOG:

Brent Finlay: The law is there and it can be used but there is a real reluctance to use it. Writs have to be served on landholders, they have to be followed up, the properties have to be inspected. It's an expensive process, and local government, they're under cost pressures like everybody else and they continually remind us of that.

Ian Townsend: The mayor of the Blackall Tambo Regional Council, Barry Muir:

Barry Muir: It's a matter of enforcing it, having the people on the ground to ensure that it's enforced.

Ian Townsend: Has council ever served a notice on a landholder for not controlling dogs?

Barry Muir: Not in my time no, not as mayor, I don't know if they ever have. That would be a rarity I would say.

Ian Townsend: Have you ever heard of any council taking action?

Barry Muir: No, I haven't…

Ian Townsend: You're not aware of anybody ever being served with a notice?

Barry Muir: No, because most of the people, you know the people and you're not going to go and antagonise people, you'll actually try and get it by a cooperative manner and sometimes that'll work, but you get some people who don't.

Ian Townsend: Councils might be reluctant to act, but landholders are still able to sue. In 2001, a grazier in Victoria sued his neighbour for not doing enough to control wild dogs that were killing his sheep. He was awarded $100,000 in damages and the neighbour, which happened to be the Victorian government, was found to have breached its 'duty of care' by not doing enough to stop dingoes on a forest reserve raiding his sheep. There's a link to the case on the Background Briefing website.

Sometimes the neighbours don't know or care if dingoes are on their property. In western Queensland, big cattle runs have swallowed sheep stations. Cattle can be mustered maybe once a year, and a lot of people living in those areas have gone. It's fractured once tight-knit rural communities.

National wild dog facilitator Greg Mifsud:

Greg Mifsud: From my perspective I've noticed the change in the demographic, and with that unfortunately comes a change in community attitudes as well, and in years gone by everyone got together and worked together because they were all just as concerned about the neighbour's income as their own. I just have my concerns that in this day and age we're not seeing that community fabric that we used to have in regional Australia, and unfortunately your neighbour's demise because he is sheep producer doesn't seem to carry the same sort of weight that it used to.

Ian Townsend: But it's this co-operation that's needed now, more than ever, if an emerging wild dog control strategy called 'nil tenure' is to work. 'Nil tenure' refers to the widespread baiting of a region regardless of property boundaries. It's something Andrew Martin wants to do in the Blackall-Tambo region. He's the chairman of the local Wild Dog Advisory Group and is also one of the last wool growers around Tambo.

Andrew Martin: It needs to be a concerted, dedicated, prolonged attack on wild dogs, finding where they are and why they are where they are, and finding a solution to the problem of why they are where they are, and making everyone in that area do something about it.

Ian Townsend: But that requires a lot of arm twisting.

Andrew Martin: Whether it's by coercion or whether you take him out the back and give him a good hiding or whether you just invade his joint and do it yourself, which has been done, I might tell you…

Ian Townsend: It's coming to war, is it?

Andrew Martin: Oh absolutely. If someone through negligence threatens my way of living, preventing me from bringing up my children the way I want and my grandchildren, she's on mate, I don't give a bugger, it's on.

Ian Townsend: Background Briefing spoke to a number of other land owners about tensions between sheep and cattle producers. While they acknowledged some tension, they didn't want to speak about it, and none were aware of any threats or fisticuffs taking place. There's a lot of frustration, though, and part of the problem is that there are some good arguments for not killing wild dogs.

Adrian Bucknell used to run sheep near Tambo, and now has cattle on a property called Mount Owen, a bit further east, near the town of Mitchell. He has dingoes on his property, but hasn't baited with 1080 for a couple of years.

Adrian Bucknell: I can't manage to prey, I can only manage the predators. If the prey move off then I can bait, if there is an abundance of prey then I'll just leave them alone.

Ian Townsend: When you say 'prey' you're talking about kangaroos?

Adrian Bucknell: Kangaroos, wallabies, even goannas and possums, anything they eat really.

Ian Townsend: So it's a matter of really not so much managing as just watching what happens?

Adrian Bucknell: Yeah, and being a bit proactive. Like I'm aware that we're approaching winter so the numbers of the prey animals will decrease in the next couple of months, so if the dogs look like they're getting too active then yes, I'll bait for sure.

Ian Townsend: His strategy is based on the theory that dingoes prefer to hunt native prey and, if left alone in good seasons, won't attack calves.

Adrian Bucknell: I didn't really have a strategy in place until the zoologist Lee Allen came up and started to do some trials there, and it's through his research really that I've taken on this regime of keeping more of an eye on the native wildlife population and the number of dog-bitten calves…of course if I've got dog-bitten calves I know I've got issues there, but it's all to do with the seasons.

Ian Townsend: Adrian Bucknell. He's referring there to a zoologist with Biosecurity Queensland, Dr Lee Allen. Last week, the CSIRO journal Animal Production Science published Lee Allen's new research paper, and you can find a link to it on the Background Briefing website.

The paper describes a study showing that poisoning with 1080 led to an increase in dingo attacks on cattle. It appears that killing the adult dingoes changed the structure of packs. It's really complicated. Background Briefing sought an interview with Dr Allen, but he's not been able to talk to the media.

What set the cat amongst the pigeons was an interview he did a few weeks ago with the ABC's Country Hour radio program, explaining his research.

Lee Allen [archival]: The main thing that we found where we were comparing where we had controlled dingoes or baited dingoes with 1080 once or twice per year for over several years and compared that to other parts of the same property where dingoes were not controlled, we found that predation occurred infrequently whether you baited or not, but we found it occurred more often and with higher losses where we had controlled dingoes.

Ian Townsend: That's the controversial bit; that 1080 baiting increased the dingo attacks on calves.

Lee Allen [archival]: No one was more surprised than I to get those results. What we have concluded from there is the impact of baiting on the social organisation of the dingoes creates a disturbance in there that when you control dingoes and you remove those you basically create a dispersal sink. You have young dispersing dingoes from usually pups from the previous year coming into that area and they don't have the pack size or the hunting experience to be able to handle those larger prey, and so they are then left with the problem of how to feed themselves.

Ian Townsend: In other words, if you kill the older and more experienced dingoes by poisoning them, a few weeks later when the poison's gone, young inexperienced dingoes can flood into the territory.

Lee Allen [archival]: And it's basically getting a whole bunch of young teenagers together and they just get up to all sorts of strife and that's when they start chasing calves and tearing ears and they get stuck into them.

Ian Townsend: Lee Allen's research is on cattle, in certain areas, in certain seasons. But the mere suggestion that 1080 can be counterproductive in some cases isn't the message authorities want bandied about.

Brent Finlay is from QDOG group, which advises the Queensland Government on wild dog policy.

Brent Finlay: I've seen that research that Lee has done and he's very recognised as a pre-eminent scientist in wild dogs, but we also know on other properties where people do not do any baiting, then they go out and their calving percentages are down to 30% and 40%. It's a bit hard to run the ruler across the whole of the beef industry and say that.

Ian Townsend: Exactly, and I don't think Lee Allen was doing that, was he.

Brent Finlay: No, people tend to sort of hang on to what they hear, and the message that we would hate to see is that people take it away that, oh, that may be the case on their property and they shouldn't control wild dogs, when they have a responsibility to control wild dogs.

Ian Townsend: Is that concern about his research being misinterpreted the reason why he hasn't been allowed to talk to me?

Brent Finlay: I don't know anything about that.

Ian Townsend: A spokesman for Queensland's Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry says Lee Allen is declining interviews and that his work is only preliminary.

Here's Greg Mifsud from the Invasive Animals CRC:

Greg Mifsud: Lee's work was done in fairly far north Queensland I suppose, up near the Gulf, different landscapes, different prey availabilities, different production entities.

Ian Townsend: But the structure of the dog packs too I understand has changed, and when you bait, this is the theory, that you wipe out the experienced adults and you have a lot of the juveniles coming through that don't learn to hunt properly and wander around maiming.

Greg Mifsud: Yeah, look, the jury's out with me on that one. We've also got increased information now with the level of hybridisation in dogs further to the south that pack structure may not be as stable as what it traditionally was with the purebred dingo.

Ian Townsend: But there's also another theory, that 1080 poisoning, by changing the pack structure, causes more crossbreeding to occur.

Chris Dickman is professor of ecology at the University of Sydney.

Chris Dickman: There is some evidence to suggest that when you put the baits out, the baits will be discovered, they'll be taken up usually by the dominant animals in a pack, they get the priority of access to the baits. If the baits then kill these animals then there's a lack of parental control, if you like, over the youngsters. They're free to do whatever they like. There's a lot of suggestion that this is the mechanism by which interbreeding between dingoes and domestic dogs can take place; the removal of the dominant animals from the pack structure. So it's a disruptive effect of the poisoning that has perhaps led to some of the problems that we're seeing at the moment.

Ian Townsend: The other area of controversy here is animal welfare. The active ingredient of 1080 is sodium fluoroacetate, which is found in some Australian plants. Some native wildlife are resistant to it. The Queensland Government describes 1080 as 'species specific' and humane. Opponents say it causes a slow cruel death.

Chris Dickman again:

Chris Dickman: One of the reasons why it's fallen out of favour is that there's been increasing concern from the animal welfare point of view that perhaps it doesn't kill animals quickly and cleanly but rather they have a more painful death. If we could avoid that then it's probably a good thing to do so.

Ian Townsend: Well, the Queensland Government describes 1080 as both species specific and humane. Is that correct?

Chris Dickman: I think you could probably find a lot of arguments against that. Perhaps if you use a high concentration of 1080 and it's taken up quickly it will kill animals very speedily, but one of the benefits, in a sense, of 1080 is that it degrades, it doesn't accumulate long-term in the environment, but as it degrades, the toxicity of the poison diminishes, and if animals get amounts that are just on the border of being lethal it can take them a lot longer to die, and in those situations almost certainly it's not humane.

Ian Townsend: Greg Mifsud from the Invasive Animal CRC:

Greg Mifsud: I don't know, it's a debate we're going to continue to have I suppose, because the way 1080 works it has to be metabolised and it causes a breakdown in the central nervous system in canids, in dogs, so that causes a lot of visually disturbing symptoms like the paddling and the retching and the barking that we see in some of the domestic dogs that get baited, unfortunately, and that's where the risk is. But I suppose by disrupting the central nervous system, it's very difficult to tell whether the dogs are suffering any pain, and in fact most of the research that's done concluded that because of the breakdown of the nervous system it's unlikely the animals feel anything, despite the fact that for someone watching the symptoms it's quite distressing.

Ian Townsend: Then again, wild dogs maim and kill livestock and pets, and there's a responsibility to protect their welfare too. Greg Mifsud says animal control is always a balancing act.

Greg Mifsud: Finding stock torn up when you've got 20 or 30 sheep that are in the corner of a paddock that have been attacked, some are dead, most of them aren't, and then the landholder has to go around and put the rest of them out of their misery, it's an extremely traumatic and emotional and stressful event. So it is a balancing act between the welfare of the pest we're managing and the welfare of the livestock and domestic animals we're trying to protect.

Ian Townsend: Wild dogs are also trapped and shot, and graziers form syndicates, pooling their money to hire professional 'doggers'. Don Sallway is a dogger whose territory covers two million hectares of western Queensland. He gets paid a flat rate of $500 for every dingo scalp.

And these are the skins here, the ones you've got in the last couple of weeks?

Don Sallway: Here, these are all new, got that one yesterday.

Ian Townsend: They're more purebred dingoes by the look of them.

Don Sallway: Yeah, most of them are yella. You get the brindles like this and you'll get blacks, I haven't picked up any blacks this time but they're black like a kelpie, I think they call them an alpine, they've got a little less tan on their face than a kelpie, still the tan on their legs and sort of like three bloodlines in them.

Ian Townsend: He'll sometimes sit in a tree all night to shoot dingoes as they come to a waterhole.

Don Sallway: I generally sit in the fork of a tree for up to 12 hours, yeah, it's a bit uncomfortable but if it can cut two or three weeks off my stay I'll suffer that. When I'm too tired I back off and I'll just sleep on the ground there and be back in before daylight and into them again, yes. A little while back I got 16 for the night but I had 12 down by 6:10 in the evening but it was an extremely hot day and they were a long way from other waters and you can pull the numbers back really quick, it's quicker than trapping if you've got the elements just right.

Ian Townsend: Last year Don Sallway bagged more than 600 wild dogs. At $500 a scalp, he made over $300,000.

Don Sallway: Yeah, I'm actually doing quite well now. I started off on the same money 19 years ago and I taught myself, I did it tough for a long time. The dog numbers weren't nowhere near what they are now, so I'm pulling in nearly 600 dogs a year or a bit over every year now. Like my original…when I kicked off I might have got 50 or 60 or 70 dogs for the year, you know. The problem is gradually getting worse.

Ian Townsend: That's why the surviving sheep graziers at Blackall and Barcaldine want to build a new 800-kilometre-long dog-proof fence around the region. The plan is to enclose six million hectares of sheep country and then eradicate the dingoes inside it. At a recent meeting in Barcaldine, the Queensland Premier Campbell Newman promised $30,000 for a feasibility study of the fence.

Campbell Newman: If this thing ultimately was to happen I reckon it will save millions and millions of dollars in lost production. That's money that will come back into the local communities. I think it's a very sensible and reasonable investment.

Ian Townsend: Grazier Jenny Keogh says it's really the last hope for the wool industry in this area.

Jenny Keogh: It's costing an enormous amount of money for governments and producers and communities in this part of the world, and we have to use every tool that we possibly can, and hoping this feasibility study will prove up, that this infrastructure will actually offer a return on investment, so that it's going to offer our communities a future which at the moment they don't have, or their future will be definitely without sheep.

Ian Townsend: Not everyone thinks the new fence will work though. On the other side of Blackall is Terry Brennan, who runs cattle. He's also a local councillor.

Terry Brennan: Look, I'm in favour of the feasibility study. My concerns, and I've said this before, is that I'm concerned about where are we going to get the capital to actually build it. A figure I heard bandied around the other day from someone was it's going to cost $10 million to do this extension that we've got, as well as then the maintenance of it. So I'm concerned about the capital outlay and then the maintenance, because I would stress again, these fences are only as good as the weakest point and if they're not being maintained somewhere, well then we may as well not have it.

Ian Townsend: Wild dog control costs Blackall council $300,000 a year. That's about 10% of its rate income. Terry Brennan says it's not just a lack of fences that started the problem. There just aren't enough people around anymore to make a dint in wild dog numbers.

Terry Brennan: They're going out of sheep so there's less people around, the movement of people into the mining industry, again, there is less employees even on cattle properties. Also the restrictions on weapons are a bit of a problem, and only yesterday I was talking to someone who used to be a grader operator on the Blackall Shire Council some years ago and even they carried rifles with them when they went out grading the rural roads and now they're not allowed to. And there is a whole lot of other reasons why…you just must remember we've have had two really good seasons and that has contributed to it as well.

Ian Townsend: Those good seasons have caused an explosion in wildlife in western Queensland, and although drought is now starting to bite, you can see the wildlife everywhere as you drive along the Warrego Highway. Wherever you stop the car, the smell of decay is overwhelming. Fifty kilometres south of Blackall, the wild dog barrier fence is broken by a metal grid on the highway. A further 50 kilometres inside the barrier fence is the town of Tambo, another wool area that's rapidly switching to cattle because the wild dogs are thick on the ground here too.

As it happens, the annual Tambo stock show is on. This is traditional sheep and wool country, but the show's sheep exhibit is a ghost of what it used to be. All the big sheep stations have gone to cattle around here, including the iconic Tambo Station. It's owned by David Nugent.

David Nugent: Yeah, in years gone by we run quite a lot of sheep.

Ian Townsend: Why did you go out of sheep?

David Nugent: Just the dingo problem, solely the dingo problem. For a district that probably had a million sheep in it, like the Blackall and Tambo sheep areas were probably a million or better, there's probably got 100,000 or less left now, probably less than that in fact.

Ian Townsend: Do you still have your shearing sheds?

David Nugent: It's all still there.

Ian Townsend: Another sheep grazier is Andrew Martin, who also doubles as the show announcer. He's been doing everything he can to cling on to sheep; baiting, trapping, and experimenting with guardian animals. Andrew Martin says he's going to stick with sheep as long as he can.

Andrew Martin: I have to stick to sheep because of the economics of it. Growing wool and sheep on any of this traditional sheep country is up to four times more profitable per acre than any other enterprise, so I haven't got the luxury of just going into cattle, I've got to grow wool and I've got to grow sheep and I want to. And so I've got cattle, not many, and I've got sheep, and if it doesn't rain shortly I won't have many of them either.

Ian Townsend: The drought is spreading down through the eastern Australian sheep belt, and so are the dingoes. The dog fence and the 1080 baiting that was supposed to stop the dingoes entering the sheep country has failed, and dogger Don Sallway believes Australia's sheep and wool industry is now in peril.

Don Sallway: They're actually breeding inside the barrier fence now because a small percentage of graziers won't let you on to do anything with them. And by law they're supposed to control their ferals inside the fence and it's just a matter of getting the government legislation right to be able to enforce it. It's like we clean them up to a certain area and then they migrate back in over where we've already cleaned up, and it gets very distressing and hard to take after a while.

Ian Townsend: Around Blackall it's already too late. This country that's run sheep for more than 100 years is now overrun with wild dogs. In the stock yard at Amaroo, Rick Keogh examines the bite torn from the shoulder of one of his rams.

Rick Keogh: We average $500 or $600 for our rams.

Ian Townsend: You can't afford to lose too many of them, can you.

Rick Keogh: Well, if you had this bloke to the 60 that we've already lost, it starts to get pretty expensive.

Ian Townsend: As a last resort he's building his own dog-proof fence, hoping it'll save his livelihood and the last of his sheep.

Rick Keogh: We've sort of lost $400,000 to $500,000 over the last five years through lost production.

Ian Townsend: When does it come to the stage where you have to consider whether you're going to continue like that?

Rick Keogh: Well, we're at that stage now. We're building fences to put the special stud ewes behind initially. We've fenced 3,000 acres, enclosed 3,000 acres and we're going to monitor it and see how successful it is. But this is a hugely expensive exercise that…but unless we do it, we might as well sell up and go.

Ian Townsend: Background Briefing's coordinating producer is Linda McGinness, research by Anna Whitfeld, technical production by Louis Mitchell, the executive producer is Chris Bullock, and I'm Ian Townsend.