May 25th, 2020A night in Wombat Forest, and a pig dies
THE marks on the pig’s hind legs looked like dog bites, and it was gasping for air.
On a closer look, its owner found her Labrador-sized pig had been slit around the throat. She was then shot and buried.
This incident near Daylesford caused what is now the usual reaction: horror by some, online abuse from others.
Pig breeder Stephanie Swales seems almost as rocked by the trolls as the attack on her for speaking out. Stephanie felt the need for locals to know what had happened, and says the police asked her to post online. One result was a lot of abuse.
While fond of her pigs, Stephanie says she hunts and in time her animals would be used for the intended purpose.
The attack was condemned by the Sporting Shooters Association as animal cruelty.
It all began when the pandemic rules were eased and a huge amount of people surged to the forest to camp, she says.
Stephanie said there was a huge amount of noise over the weekend, people hooning around in cars and quad bikes and shots were heard throughout until the early hours.
Stephanie, a 28-year-old disability worker, lives on her family’s property. She asked that her exact location not be published.
“We do have poachers – unfortunately these kind of people do the wrong thing, and do give respectable hunters a bad name,” Stephanie says.
Over Friday and Saturday nights her two dogs were “going ballistic” at the noise of bikes, four-wheel-drives and guns. ”We’ve always had hunters, which has never been an issue, but having people behaving like this unfortunately ruins it for people doing the right thing.”
Each morning she takes her coffee to check on her “girls”.
This time her pair of three-year-old Berkshires, weighing just under 50kg, and the five piglets, three-months-old, were gone, through a double-strand hot wire fence. They had been there, “a good kilometre from the road”, when she checked at midnight. Someone has had to physically get them out of their pen and then out of her property.
Stephanie spent all morning searching and checking with neighbours. She ran into a fellow neighbour who was driving out to see what was happening after hearing gun shots. He took her phone number and soon called to say they were on his property. “Pigs have a great sense of smell. They were on the way home.”
She is disappointed that people came on to her land, which is marked private property. The two adults cost $150 as piglets, and then, she said, there was the cost of feeding.
“It’s disappointing to lose something you have put so much time and effort into, as most farmers will know. They are like dogs and the piglets are like having puppies, mucking around and trying to pull the washing off the line.”
Now she has moved the pigs to 10 metres from her home, 450 metres from where they were taken. “I just hope something like this doesn’t happen again.”
Words: Kevin Childs | Images: Contributed
