Shades Of Grey
My father had been a pilot in 3 Squadron in the Middle East during the War and he had a bunch of mates that shared the experiences of that time. One, Herb Rabig, from a property well west of Windorah was a fairly regular visitor, and he became one of my early Mentors. Herb lived in an area where dogs were far more numerous, sheep had long since been driven out of that country, and at times even cattle were threatened.
The problem with trying to shoot numbers… they are usually only a few steps from thick cover, a bolt action rifle can only get one or two from the mob. They are so well fed on cane that they simply ignore baits and traps.
He told me of the period when Myxo was introduced and almost wiped the rabbits out of the desert country a little further out ... an enormous population of dogs had become dependent on rabbit for food and suddenly they vanished. The dogs moved to find something else and Herb said for a couple of years they hardly branded a calf, such was the predation. He said that on an average dayʼs driving around checking stock waters, not really looking for dogs, but shooting any he saw, he would average 30. Not having kept count exactly, he thought he had accounted for around 10,000 over the years!
The biggest one. As it says, the biggest one out of the above mob … probably would have been better to get a big sow, the breeder. 300 Weatherby this time, with it and the 257 I could frequently get 2 if they stood close together!
For a young and impressionable lad, keen on his hunting, this was as good as an African adventure! Herb always brought something new to try out when he came through and gradually taught me an immense amount about the skills needed to be both a good hunter, a good shot, and a careful reloader. Finally getting out to his home property in 1966 and spending a bit of time hunting dogs in the sandhills was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Typical Burdekin pig. Big, fat, no tusks…. I got one reasonable set from 360 odd
pigs shot in this area.
Sadly, like many of my early Mentors, Herb has been gone for some years now..... All of this early life reinforced in me the idea that, in settled & stocked country, the only good dingo was a scalped one. There is little worse that I have had to deal with than heading up the paddock early in the morning to check stock, to be greeted with flocks of Crows and a string of dead or worse, mortally wounded sheep that I have to destroy.
An alert but unafraid pup at "den" entrance.
Worse was having the childrenʼs pet lamb flock attacked and almost wiped out one night, seeing the dog killing as we went to the school bus, and not having a rifle in the car.... Their hearts were not in it that day and the news was hard to break when they got home.. It would not have been a good day for a Greenie to come visiting!
The country that we lived in varied greatly, from wide open spaces to very dense heavy timber, so there was no really ideal rifle / scope / load combination to cover the lot. It was in a different time then, when we were free to buy whatever tool we needed to do the job. By far the best scrub gun I ever had was an SKK carbine with a 30 shot magazine and a spare in the pocket! Getting the dog was a lot more important than monitoring ammo usage and the target was often fleeting at best ... Once the pigs moved into our area in the early 80ʼs the little carbine ran hot, my son Andy and I once scored 18 out of a mob with about a magazine each!
In the open country shots could be as far as 400 yards, if I was feeling good and the day was calm. Grouping ability of the rifle and load was largely irrelevant, it was the first shot from a cold barrel that counted. A missed dog was a very difficult one to get a second chance at, so the decision to take a long shot had to be carefully weighed. My most successful rifle was a Weatherby Vanguard in 270 Win. with a Leupold 6X. Running close second were a number, a Ruger 22.250, a 25-06, and a 308 Norma, both built up rifles.
We never had rangefinders, so flat shooting rifles compensated slightly for guestimated ranges. The last 2 ran equal for the longest successful shots I made, 430 yards each, both accurately measured as they were down fence lines and I could simply count posts and multiply. Pretty pleased with both!
The "wildest" one I got was actually with my Browning pump shotgun, but it involved chasing the dog over a 50 acre paddock freshly worked with a deep-ripping subsoiler. My son and I were sharing a ride on one ag-bike, doing a late afternoon check around ewes and lambs as we knew we had dogs about. Almost on dusk we saw a single dog start to cross this field and we were a bit stuck, as we both had guns... a long shot was out of the question. We waited till he was more than half way across before I started the bike, leaving Andy to try to cut him off if I fell off....
Fortunately the dog did not take it too seriously till I was pretty close, so we reached the far side close together where I had the speed edge... Trying to load the gun left handed while in pursuit was "interesting", as was tossing it up to catch by pistol grip and getting the first shot away one handed ... It took probably only 2 - 3 minutes to chase the dog a few hundred yards, through one gate, then through another fence where I had to drop the bike and run, seeing only the back end of the dog and having BB shot it was difficult to ground him, but after a couple he made the mistake of turning side on and it was all over with one more....
He and his mates been killing 8 - 10 head a night, beautiful cross-bred lambs on point of sale, and some ewes, so I did not care how I got him, so long as I did..... I did! Surviving the one handed ride across that paddock was a miracle in itself ... He was part of a family of 5 dogs that came in almost at the end of our time there. The first four were pretty quick, a spring gun on the hole in the netting got dad, a trap had the next one and a very early morning ride up to the sheep revealed another just leaving the scene of the crime .... sent a 270 Ballistic Tip to discourage him from coming again.. The fourth was the ploughed paddock job, leaving just mum, an old red bitch who was taunting us a bit. She was living on a thick Iron Bark ridge within sight of our house and following the same path most nights to go up and kill.
Not the least interested in traps, and in an area where I could not set a gun, it was getting a bit personal... I once walked the ridge to see if she might offer a glimpse, but a bunch of roos took off and alerted her, she bolted in their midst, no chance of a shot. A few days later I caught sight of her again, just on daybreak, eating a lamb breakfast. Too far for a sure shot I tried to get in a bit but she was alert and lived again....
About ten days passed, along with a good few more ewes and lambs, we were getting a bit desperate ... went up before dawn and waited one morning till light, to see the sheep all bunched up out in the middle of their oats paddock ... she was around somewhere...
No sign so I started the bike and quietly rode half way around the paddock without a sign when all of a sudden the sheep were galloping!! She was seemingly so confident of being able to beat me that she was attacking in daylight! This had to be right, so I decided it would cost one more lamb, I was not going to risk a running shot. Getting within a couple of hundred yards off to the side of the frantic sheep I watched as she chased, finally choosing a beautiful fat lamb, she grabbed its rump, flung sideways, cartwheeling the galloping animal and as it stopped she had its throat ripped out.
As she chose her mark I skidded to a broadside stop and had the bike seat for a rest, to be absolutely sure... there was a bit of blood left in the adrenaline stream at that stage!! It was roughly 200 yards and she was facing away, but the Weatherby did a perfect job, throwing her straight over her last victim.... Not so very long after that we were forced off and a few years later I found myself in the Tropical North, a very different environment.
Here in sugar cane and vegetable growing country there were no sheep or cattle around, but pigs were everywhere and a terrible pest. I soon realised there were quite a number of dingos too, and the first thought was to reach for my rifle again. Fortunately though (??) a bit of careful observation had me leaving the gun safe locked, as far as the dogs were concerned. In part of the big property I worked on initially there was a long length of 500mm polythene underground water main that was waiting for installation. A dingo family decided it was a great hollow log and had a litter of pups in it.
As they grew there was increasing sign left around of what they were feeding the pups, and it was almost totally piglet! I had watched a couple of times when dogs were obviously following pigs, and every time we came on pig tracks in the mud from irrigation tail water, there were invariably dog tracks over them. While some of the blokes on the farm were of the "shoot everything" mould I started to defend the dogs role as pig controllers. I was given the task of doing it from the human side, shooting 363 in my 4 years there ... often wishing for my little SKK when I came on a good mob with only a 3 shot magazine.... Thanks John Howard, for nothing...
The problem with trying to shoot numbers… they are usually only a few steps from thick cover, a bolt action rifle can only get one or two from the mob. They are so well fed on cane that they simply ignore baits and traps.
He told me of the period when Myxo was introduced and almost wiped the rabbits out of the desert country a little further out ... an enormous population of dogs had become dependent on rabbit for food and suddenly they vanished. The dogs moved to find something else and Herb said for a couple of years they hardly branded a calf, such was the predation. He said that on an average dayʼs driving around checking stock waters, not really looking for dogs, but shooting any he saw, he would average 30. Not having kept count exactly, he thought he had accounted for around 10,000 over the years!
The biggest one. As it says, the biggest one out of the above mob … probably would have been better to get a big sow, the breeder. 300 Weatherby this time, with it and the 257 I could frequently get 2 if they stood close together!
For a young and impressionable lad, keen on his hunting, this was as good as an African adventure! Herb always brought something new to try out when he came through and gradually taught me an immense amount about the skills needed to be both a good hunter, a good shot, and a careful reloader. Finally getting out to his home property in 1966 and spending a bit of time hunting dogs in the sandhills was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Typical Burdekin pig. Big, fat, no tusks…. I got one reasonable set from 360 odd
pigs shot in this area.
Sadly, like many of my early Mentors, Herb has been gone for some years now..... All of this early life reinforced in me the idea that, in settled & stocked country, the only good dingo was a scalped one. There is little worse that I have had to deal with than heading up the paddock early in the morning to check stock, to be greeted with flocks of Crows and a string of dead or worse, mortally wounded sheep that I have to destroy.
An alert but unafraid pup at "den" entrance.
Worse was having the childrenʼs pet lamb flock attacked and almost wiped out one night, seeing the dog killing as we went to the school bus, and not having a rifle in the car.... Their hearts were not in it that day and the news was hard to break when they got home.. It would not have been a good day for a Greenie to come visiting!
The country that we lived in varied greatly, from wide open spaces to very dense heavy timber, so there was no really ideal rifle / scope / load combination to cover the lot. It was in a different time then, when we were free to buy whatever tool we needed to do the job. By far the best scrub gun I ever had was an SKK carbine with a 30 shot magazine and a spare in the pocket! Getting the dog was a lot more important than monitoring ammo usage and the target was often fleeting at best ... Once the pigs moved into our area in the early 80ʼs the little carbine ran hot, my son Andy and I once scored 18 out of a mob with about a magazine each!
In the open country shots could be as far as 400 yards, if I was feeling good and the day was calm. Grouping ability of the rifle and load was largely irrelevant, it was the first shot from a cold barrel that counted. A missed dog was a very difficult one to get a second chance at, so the decision to take a long shot had to be carefully weighed. My most successful rifle was a Weatherby Vanguard in 270 Win. with a Leupold 6X. Running close second were a number, a Ruger 22.250, a 25-06, and a 308 Norma, both built up rifles.
We never had rangefinders, so flat shooting rifles compensated slightly for guestimated ranges. The last 2 ran equal for the longest successful shots I made, 430 yards each, both accurately measured as they were down fence lines and I could simply count posts and multiply. Pretty pleased with both!
The "wildest" one I got was actually with my Browning pump shotgun, but it involved chasing the dog over a 50 acre paddock freshly worked with a deep-ripping subsoiler. My son and I were sharing a ride on one ag-bike, doing a late afternoon check around ewes and lambs as we knew we had dogs about. Almost on dusk we saw a single dog start to cross this field and we were a bit stuck, as we both had guns... a long shot was out of the question. We waited till he was more than half way across before I started the bike, leaving Andy to try to cut him off if I fell off....
Fortunately the dog did not take it too seriously till I was pretty close, so we reached the far side close together where I had the speed edge... Trying to load the gun left handed while in pursuit was "interesting", as was tossing it up to catch by pistol grip and getting the first shot away one handed ... It took probably only 2 - 3 minutes to chase the dog a few hundred yards, through one gate, then through another fence where I had to drop the bike and run, seeing only the back end of the dog and having BB shot it was difficult to ground him, but after a couple he made the mistake of turning side on and it was all over with one more....
He and his mates been killing 8 - 10 head a night, beautiful cross-bred lambs on point of sale, and some ewes, so I did not care how I got him, so long as I did..... I did! Surviving the one handed ride across that paddock was a miracle in itself ... He was part of a family of 5 dogs that came in almost at the end of our time there. The first four were pretty quick, a spring gun on the hole in the netting got dad, a trap had the next one and a very early morning ride up to the sheep revealed another just leaving the scene of the crime .... sent a 270 Ballistic Tip to discourage him from coming again.. The fourth was the ploughed paddock job, leaving just mum, an old red bitch who was taunting us a bit. She was living on a thick Iron Bark ridge within sight of our house and following the same path most nights to go up and kill.
Not the least interested in traps, and in an area where I could not set a gun, it was getting a bit personal... I once walked the ridge to see if she might offer a glimpse, but a bunch of roos took off and alerted her, she bolted in their midst, no chance of a shot. A few days later I caught sight of her again, just on daybreak, eating a lamb breakfast. Too far for a sure shot I tried to get in a bit but she was alert and lived again....
About ten days passed, along with a good few more ewes and lambs, we were getting a bit desperate ... went up before dawn and waited one morning till light, to see the sheep all bunched up out in the middle of their oats paddock ... she was around somewhere...
No sign so I started the bike and quietly rode half way around the paddock without a sign when all of a sudden the sheep were galloping!! She was seemingly so confident of being able to beat me that she was attacking in daylight! This had to be right, so I decided it would cost one more lamb, I was not going to risk a running shot. Getting within a couple of hundred yards off to the side of the frantic sheep I watched as she chased, finally choosing a beautiful fat lamb, she grabbed its rump, flung sideways, cartwheeling the galloping animal and as it stopped she had its throat ripped out.
As she chose her mark I skidded to a broadside stop and had the bike seat for a rest, to be absolutely sure... there was a bit of blood left in the adrenaline stream at that stage!! It was roughly 200 yards and she was facing away, but the Weatherby did a perfect job, throwing her straight over her last victim.... Not so very long after that we were forced off and a few years later I found myself in the Tropical North, a very different environment.
Here in sugar cane and vegetable growing country there were no sheep or cattle around, but pigs were everywhere and a terrible pest. I soon realised there were quite a number of dingos too, and the first thought was to reach for my rifle again. Fortunately though (??) a bit of careful observation had me leaving the gun safe locked, as far as the dogs were concerned. In part of the big property I worked on initially there was a long length of 500mm polythene underground water main that was waiting for installation. A dingo family decided it was a great hollow log and had a litter of pups in it.
As they grew there was increasing sign left around of what they were feeding the pups, and it was almost totally piglet! I had watched a couple of times when dogs were obviously following pigs, and every time we came on pig tracks in the mud from irrigation tail water, there were invariably dog tracks over them. While some of the blokes on the farm were of the "shoot everything" mould I started to defend the dogs role as pig controllers. I was given the task of doing it from the human side, shooting 363 in my 4 years there ... often wishing for my little SKK when I came on a good mob with only a 3 shot magazine.... Thanks John Howard, for nothing...
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