Andrew Rule: Livestock theft one of most profitable, poorly-policed crimes

Soaring meat prices have made livestock theft one of the most profitable crimes, but little is being done to stop it in Victoria — a far cry from when it was a hanging offence.

About 30,000 Australian cattle and sheep are stolen each year, causing up to $100m in losses.

It sounds like a scene straight from the screen, a modern Western with shades of outback horror, Yellowstone meets Wolf Creek.

But it wasn’t a script writer’s imagination that threw up the unnerving story, The Devil’s Triangle.

It was an Australian woman, Frances M. Boyle, who wrote about her fear living on a cattle station in remote Cape York in the late 1980s.

For years, Strathmore Station was under siege by a cattle-stealing ring which had secret support from bent police and officials and a fork-tongued network of locals.

“In the world of cattle duffing,” Boyle wrote, “the branding iron gives way to the gun. These days, when the men are out mustering until well after dark and I am home alone cooking dinner, I have every light on inside and outside the house.

“As I walk from room to room, I carry my rifle with me. So much has happened over the past six years that now all I feel is a strange coldness deep inside me. I know that if someone was to come into my house yard and up the steps, and if I do not know them, I will shoot to kill …”

As one reviewer noted, Boyle’s account is “an engrossing tale of mayhem, villainy and pillage.” The shocking thing is that her story of battling organised cattle thieves is not fiction.

At least nine people were involved in stealing 3000 “cleanskins” (some claim it was double that number) over several years from the enormous station near Croydon on Cape York.

Many locals surely knew about it and still do, but the bush code of silence is like the mafia “omerta”.

This is not just about fear but admiration: “bushranger syndrome”. Up north, the cattle thief Harry Readford is still a legendary figure like Ned Kelly. In 1870, Readford “lifted” 1000 head of cattle from Bowen Downs in central Queensland and drove them some 1500km across the desert to South Australia where he and two accomplices sold them for £5000 — more than a million dollars in current terms.

Cattle duffers often arrive with weapons and dogs.

Readford’s extraordinary feat was borrowed for the fictitious bushranger “Captain Starlight” in the novel Robbery Under Arms. The real Readford was acquitted by an admiring bush jury, to the disgust of the presiding judge.

Many locals in remote areas still have a sneaking tolerance of stock theft, which makes it easier for thieves to victimise stock owners.

In the Devil’s Triangle case, the stolen cattle were worth about a million dollars in 1989. With the inflated beef prices of 2023, they’d now be worth more than $5m. That explains why stock theft is surging all over Australia, including Victoria: big meat prices attract crooks confident they can get away with a crime that offers huge returns and little risk.

About 30,000 Australian cattle and sheep are stolen yearly, causing up to $100m in losses. Little is being done to stop it, especially in Victoria.

In the Strathmore cattle heists, it took six years for the Queensland stock squad to nail the key thieves from among what some described as a “dynasty” of cattle duffers now celebrated in a district with its annual Poddy Dodgers ball and rodeo.

John Andrew Pickering, his uncle Clive Robert Pickering and their accomplice David Leonard Keating were eventually jailed over their big steal. But others went undetected or received token punishment.

As revealed at trial, the syndicate organised harassment and victimisation, arson, and corruption. Yet the guilty men served less than half their seven-year sentences — underlining the fact that livestock theft has become one of the most profitable and poorly-policed of crimes, a far cry from when it was a hanging offence.

Big-time stock theft can produce buckets of cash — but doesn’t attract the same police “heat” or jail time as armed robbery or drug trafficking.

As for “midnight butchers”, opportunists who kill other people’s livestock to eat or sell the meat: in the unlikely event of an arrest, punishment is much lighter than the 14-year maximum set under laws going back to the time when stock theft was punished as heavily as rape or serious assault.

Large-scale theft is traditionally linked to huge outback holdings where big numbers of stock can be out of sight of station owners and staff for weeks at a time.

But enormous prices have caused a silent crime wave on farms, even in closely-settled Victoria. It is not just remote outback settlements that harbour stock thieves: they infest rural Victoria, operating with near impunity because the state’s police force has not had a dedicated stock squad since the mid-1990s.

It is not just remote outback settlements that harbour stock thieves: they infest rural Victoria,. Picture: Zoe Phillips

Inside information passes around rural workers — shearers and roustabouts, fencers and farmworkers, saleyard hands and stock truck drivers. Many being small landholders with shearing sheds, trailers, trucks, working dogs and the skill to handle stock.

Likely targets get hit repeatedly. When the new owner of Strathmore Station, Scott Harris, flew to the coast for his wedding at Palm Cove in 2012, so did the managers of his Queensland properties. Which was exactly when well-informed thieves stole 860 head of prime bullocks from Harris’s fattening property near Tambo in southern Queensland.

Harris posted a $100,000 reward to solve the riddle of how nearly a million dollars on four legs vanished in a theft that had to involve several stockmen and dogs — and at least four road trains. No result.

It was the same for the former owners of historic Banongill station near Skipton in Victoria more recently, when well-informed thieves with a semi-trailer (or two smaller trucks), portable yards and quiet working dogs loaded more than 300 sheep one moonlit night and vanished.

Clearly, on that and many similar raids, the thieves knew when various owners or managers around the district were out for the night, or safely asleep.

Like foxes watching hen houses, stock thieves are alert for opportunity. Unnervingly for owners, it’s clear they are very familiar with the properties they strike.

In one recent case near Seymour, a stocktake after the death of the property owner revealed that a trusted manager had been conniving in long-term stock theft, pilfering fodder and farm materials and falsifying farm records.

But gathering proof against the treacherous manager was too hard so he was allowed to slither away to an interstate job without a reference — or a police record.

In January, Kilmore East farmer Kevin Butler reported losing 381 sheep. In February, 700 sheep worth $140,000 vanished from a farm west of Bendigo. In March, near Wagga Wagga, the theft of 350 Dorpers cost farmer Paul Funnell potential earnings of up to $500,000 over the next four years.

Semi-trailer wheel marks were found near Funnell’s yard and two of his alpacas had been shot dead as ewes and lambs were snatched. The bad guys were armed.

The list goes on. And for every theft reported, just as many are not.

This is the stock thieves’ edge: their crime might go undetected for days or weeks, by which time there’s no evidence of who did it. Farmers often know only by deduction (after checking the district for strays) that it is theft.

If a truckload of sheep are sneaked from a mob of hundreds, and another from another big mob, owners might not realise until a routine muster and count.

Almost half the farmers who suffer thefts fail to report to police. Picture: Zoe Phillips

This is why almost half the farmers who suffer thefts fail to report to police. They have no clear evidence of theft, even the time of theft, so naturally believe that police can’t do anything.

But failure to report feeds a vicious circle. Thieves get more cunning and confident. Police, not notified of all thefts, can’t build a pattern of offending, a modus operandi that might lead to detection.

The result is a creeping shadow of farm crime that affects more than half the farmers in Australia, sometimes forcing people from the industry and leading to financial hardship and mental breakdowns.

But there is hope ahead. A new invention has emerged from trials with farmers and police that could turn the tables on cocky stock thieves.

Australian farmers have always been inventors. Now two former “farm kids”, married couple David and Melita Smith, have taken their idea to specialists to create an electronic tag that transmits details of livestock movement by satellite in real time.

The Smiths and their backers call their invention the Ceres Tag, named after the Roman goddess of agriculture. Judging from tests run by Dr Kyle Mulrooney of the Centre for Rural Criminology at the University of New England in NSW, the tag might be the future of stock theft prevention, if not all grazing animal care.

The tag can monitor if an animal is suddenly moving more than it usually does (indicating it is being mustered or chased by dogs) and also whether it is not moving at all, flagging death, injury or sickness.

In a full-scale trial with police near Armidale late last year, mock thieves rounded up and loaded a trailer full of sheep from a property, then hit the highway towards Tamworth.

Patrolling police alerted by the “farmer” monitoring the tags were on the job within 15 minutes.

Just 10 minutes after that, they “apprehended” the vehicle of interest less than halfway to Tamworth. It was a triumph: from paddock to police station in half an hour.

The tag will be refined over time, probably becoming smaller, lighter and cheaper. But to detect theft, there’s no need to use one for each animal. A few tags scattered through a four-legged mob should be enough to put two-legged predators on the back foot.

Even if thieves working in the dark saw the stainless steel tags at all, the extra time and trouble they’d need to remove them should be enough to wreck the heist.

Maybe Captain Satellite has finally trumped Captain Starlight.