The defence counsel in the case of a Violet Town woman accused of baiting and killing eagles has questioned why Dorothy Sloan’s neighbours were not investigated further.
Mrs Sloan, 83, is facing a contested hearing in the Shepparton Magistrates’ Court, where she is accused of baiting wedge-tailed eagles and other birds of prey using other dead birds and animals that had been doused with a chemical generally used on crops.
She has pleaded not guilty to 20 charges of poisoning medium-sized raptors with bait, poisoning 11 wedge-tailed eagles with bait, seven counts of animal cruelty that resulted in the death of six wedge-tailed eagles and a whistling kite, poisoning a whistling kite, and five counts of possessing wildlife.
Mrs Sloan has pleaded guilty to 26 charges of wildlife possession, including four kangaroo joeys and 22 birds, mainly galahs and ducks.
The case comes about after carcasses of 271 dead birds and animals — most of which were wedge-tailed eagles or other birds of prey — were found in 2019 during a Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (DELWP) investigation into the poisoning of the birds in the Violet Town and Earlston areas.
The charges before the court do not relate to all the bird deaths, only those that died from July 2019 onwards.
On day eight of the hearing on Thursday, December 14, former Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning senior enforcement officer Andrew Dean was cross-examined by Mrs Sloan’s barrister Charles Morgan.
Mr Morgan spoke about how no omethoate – the chemical found to have been ingested by the dead birds – was found on the Sloan farm at Violet Town or other properties owned by her sons Kevin and Brian.
Mr Morgan questioned why one of Mrs Sloan’s neighbours was not asked further about containers of Le-Mat found at their property, but Mr Dean said that property was used for cropping and he expected those sorts of chemicals to be present.
“We made observations. Had we found baits or birds in the same concentrations (as on Sloan properties) we would have,” he said.
Mr Morgan also asked why another neighbour — also a sheep farmer — was not interviewed after a dead cockatoo was found tied up in a tree near the house and a dead eagle was found under a pile of sticks.
The farmer also told investigators he had lost about 150 lambs to eagles.
Mr Dean said anyone in the area could make a statement, but were not interviewed because “it was not our practice, or the practice of the department, to interview someone unless we believe an offence has been committed against the Wildlife Act”.
Mr Morgan raised that dead birds being used as bait could have been in the paddocks since 2018 and said that Mrs Sloan’s son Kevin had worked on the property until six weeks before his death – which was four weeks before the search of Mrs Sloan’s property.
In his summary of the case, prosecutor Chris Carr said the case was circumstantial but that “entirely speculative and unfounded hypotheses” had been raised in cross-examination of witnesses.
He said evidence suggested that Mrs Sloan was involved in the baiting of the birds, and that this just meant she was complicit if the actual baiting was done by someone else.
Mr Carr said Mrs Sloan had been telling lies when she answered questions from DELWP officers who searched her house in August and November 2019.
He said Mrs Sloan told officers she “knew nothing” about any baiting of birds, but a neighbour, who had to be cross-examined by the prosecution because she was loyal to Mrs Sloan, said she had been told on many occasions by Mrs Sloan that she was baiting eagles.
Evidence from officers who searched properties also told how some of the birds were easily seen, but she had denied knowledge of them, Mr Carr said.
He also said Mrs Sloan was actively involved in running the farm and the “control of animals that interfered with what she wanted to do”.
Evidence from a pathologist told how birds of prey that died from ingesting omethoate would likely die within minutes or hours, Mr Carr said.
The pathologist also spoke about how raptors would gorge feed and then fly to nearby trees to rest, which Mr Carr said accounted for the concentrations of the dead birds found – including some in a treed area on a property that did not belong to the Sloans.
Mr Carr also picked at defence propositions that other people could have been responsible for the baiting of the birds, saying the farming family where the chemicals were found were the ones who reported the deaths of eagles in the area to police.
The other farmer that had the dead cockatoo hanging from the tree, while “grisly”, did not have any characteristics of bait as it was under the tree’s canopy and would be hard for eagles to find.
The case continues in court.