Big cat sighted in rural Victoria

Wikipedia - Patrick Giraud

Residents in the rural hamlets of Sea Lake and Nandaly are on alert after a local farmer claimed to have spotted (excuse the pun) a leopard on his property.

Sea Lake farmer Nic Harrison told The Guardian of his "frightening" Australian big cat experience which occured while he was spraying crops.

"I was spraying at the time on my first lap around the paddock, so I was concentrating on not hitting the fence and this huge cat just appeared," he said.

"It was actually hanging around the rabbit warren and then as soon as it saw the tractor it sort of slunk down to the ground and ran."

Mr Harrison claimed the cat disappeared into dense bushland adjacent to his property after he startled the animal.

He said he spotted the animal in broad daylight, about 2pm, at a distance of 20 to 30 metres.

Mr Harrison believed what he saw may have been a spotted leopard. He said there was no chance it could have been a regular feral cat, or fox.

"I've never seen one like it. It had spots like a leopard and it had a huge long tail. Its tail was as long as its body. I've never seen anything like it.

"As soon as I saw it I thought: 'This is too big not to say anything and not worry about."

Hairy-nosed wombats feel farmers' wrath

They've always been uneasy bedfellows, but now Hairy-Nosed Wombats - a rare and protected marsupial - are being slaughtered in large numbers by South Australian farmers as their numbers boom thanks to abundant rain and plenty of food.

Nearly 900 southern hairy-nosed wombats have been shot with South Australian Government sanction since 2006, and there are claims that many more have been slaughtered illegally.

The Government also has rules which state that any young wombats found in the pouch of a shot wombat should be killed by decapitation, as this achieves "a sudden and painless death".

Sickeningly, Parliament has been told that apart from the official deaths, hundreds more wombats are being killed illegally by landholders across the state.

As well as being the state's animal emblem, the wombat is classed as a vulnerable species, but farmers claim its burrows destroy their land and damage farm machinery.

Like badgers in the United Kingdom, wombats are much maligned by the farming community and are seen as a menace, copping the blame for everything from soil erosion and breaking the legs of cattle (from falling into wombat burrows) to spreading disease.

Official figures show that between January 1, 2006, and December 22 last year, 139 permits were issued for destruction of South Australian wombats.