Grim discovery hanging from fences sparks simple change across Australia

This photo of five bats caught on a fence is hard to look at, so if you’re particularly squeamish you might want to skip this article. But if you read on you'll be rewarded, because this is actually a good news story.

A group of rescuers are working with property owners to make fences stand out, so wildlife doesn’t get caught.

The problem has been that across farms, properties and even childcare centres, barbed wire is killing and maiming Australia’s native animals and birds at an alarming rate. It’s designed to keep livestock confined, but the flaw with these fences is they're hard to see, particularly at night.

What’s the problem with barbed wire?

• There are hundreds of thousands of kilometres of barbed wire in Australia

• Bats, gliders, birds and kangaroos can’t see it, particularly at night

• It cuts into the skin and tears the wings off creatures that are snagged on it

• Because it's in remote areas, most snagged animals are never rescued and suffer slow deaths

How to change barbed wire so it doesn't kill

Significantly reducing the problem doesn’t mean replacing all of Australia’s barbed wire. Most of the entanglements happen in specific areas where there’s water, or an abundance of food.

Animal rescuer Hannah van Alphen explained to Yahoo News Australia it’s less than 1 per cent of the fences that are causing the damage.

“If there’s something like flowering eucalypt or lilly pilly nearby then that will make it a hotspot,” she said. “There was a childcare centre that had a big flowering tree hanging over its six-foot-high barbed wire security fence. Because of that food source, they were having repeat entanglement with bats.”

In that case, she used white electrical tape to highlight where the fence was and there hasn’t been an entanglement since.

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Ms van Alphen volunteers with a Queensland-based advocacy group called Wildlife Friendly Fencing and Netting that is using a grant from animal rescue group WIRES to tackle hotspots around the community.

Most of the time, they don’t remove the barbed wire, they just change it. “Sometimes we attach poly-piping or metallic flags but you can’t use them around cattle because they chew them,” she said. “Then you can just replace the top strand with plain wire or paint it.”

'Sad' reaction from some farmers

Hannah has shared a cache of images with Yahoo News Australia from the last few months showing dozens of animals caught on barbed wire fences. Once you look at them, it's easy to see why she's so passionate about the issue.

She’s based in Townsville in north Queensland and attends to around one entanglement every day. “Half the time I’ve been driving along and minding my own business and I see an animal and go: Oh crap!” she said.

Many of farmers she approaches are receptive to change, but unfortunately there are a few who refuse to listen.

“It’s a really mixed bag of responses. Some of them are aggressively confident changing their fences won’t make a difference. Sometimes I just want to bang my head into a wall when there is such resistance, when it results in such animal suffering and long, slow deaths,” Hannah said.

“For some of the fruit farmers, it’s really easy for them to say the bats, birds and even possums and gliders damage their fruit, so they’re more than happy for a fence to entangle hundreds of them a year.”

If you're someone who wants to stop wildlife getting caught on fences you can contact Wildlife Friendly Fencing here.

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