Activists cull wild dog competition

Kipley Hafey runs a local tyre shop and wanted to do something to help his community reeling from the effects of wild dog predation.

“Ninety-five per cent of my business is with graziers and I hear over the counter every week how they are struggling with dogs. I thought a competition would do something about the problem and bring money back,” Kipley said. “When you’ve got no community I’ve got no business.”

He decided to put up $5000 in prizemoney to encourage a concerted effort to increase interest in culling.

He has firsthand experience of the magnitude of the problem as a weekend shooter, but it was a photograph taken with his son and a wild dog they’d shot, used on the competition flyer, that brought torrents of abuse.

It reached as far as the US and the tyre business’s parent company, which demanded that the competition be stopped.

“They didn’t want their brand involved in something political and I’ve apologised for that,” Kipley said. “At the same time, running this competition would have had a good effect on my business.

“We had a lot of positive comment from every grazier in the district. It was only social meda criticism that stopped it.”

Kipley said the people who were torturing his staff and forcing the competition’s cancellation won’t save one wild dog.

“Councils are paying bounties now to combat the problem, and DAF staff were going to police it and make sure it was humane.

“It’s very hard to campaign against fluffy puppies, but we used to have fluffy koalas out here – where’s the concern about that?

“How is this any more different than a fishing competition?”

Kipley added that he saw the results of wild dog activity every weekend when he went shooting, specifically calves and small marsupials that had been killed.

“Everyone thinks there aren’t many about at the moment but they’re just clustering. If we can’t get rid of them in a drought, when you can see across the landscape, it’s going to be impossible when we get grass back.”