Stealing farm animals, like cattle or sheep, in Australia can land the perpetrator in jail for up to 14 years.
But that didn't deter thieves from stealing 700 sheep, valued at nearly $140,000, from a farm at Logan in central Victoria earlier this year.
So how did those who organised such a big heist, which would likely have involved several trucks and insider knowledge, get away with it?
"It had to have been very well planned," Constable Dan O'Bree tells ABC RN's The Law Report.
"It's got to be someone that knows how to handle sheep. They'd have to have good dogs ... and good equipment," he says.
Constable O'Bree is the Victoria Police Senior Constable investigating the case. He says the farmer owned around 1,800 sheep, but he didn't realise 700 were missing until he brought them all together to shear in January.
"Farms are big areas and farmers can't have their eyes over the whole place all the time … Some thieves are very opportunistic — in and out and gone before you know," he says.
Under reporting of stock theft
According to NSW police figures, an average of 16,700 sheep and 1,800 cattle were stolen each year in NSW between 2015 and 2020.
And Pricewaterhouse Coopers estimates an average of 31,000 cattle are stolen per year across Australia at an average cost of $50 million.
But agricultural crimes can be complex cases because it can be difficult to pin down exactly when the crime occurred, given animals often aren't brought together for months at a time.
Farmers often don't report this kind of theft because they aren't confident that the thieves will be caught, Constable O'Bree says.
Dr Kyle Mulrooney, who is the co-director for the Centre for Rural Criminology at the University of New England (UNE), has noticed this reluctance. This is despite the high prevalence of these crimes in the farming sector.
For the past two decades, the centre has researched crimes targeting rural properties. They found that about 80 per cent of NSW farmers surveyed confirmed that they had been victims of farm-related crime. And 40 per cent reported that they had had livestock stolen from their property.
"Farmers are well aware of the environment in which they're operating. They understand the limitations on police," Dr Mulrooney says.
"They might not check on their stock very often, for instance, so they have to give the police quite a wide window of when this theft event [may have] occurred."
Facebook for cows
New technology may help to solve or prevent these types of crimes in the future, Dr Mulrooney says.
Recently the university experimented with animal ear tags with GPS trackers.
The tag has a number of functions: the first is collecting accelerometer data, which tracks the animal's movements. Another function is to provide location data, using low-orbit satellites.
"For example, if an offender was mustering the cattle, you'll get a notification of high movement that should encourage the farmer to act and call the police," Dr Mulrooney says.
"The other [function] is you can set up boundaries in your paddock. And so if the cattle breaches that boundary, whether it strays or is in fact stolen, you'll get an alert, telling you that the cattle has breached the boundary."
He says police can use that GPS data to promptly track the animals — and potentially the offenders.
Because of the success of the trials so far, Ceres Tag, the company behind the tags, has expanded internationally. The technology is currently in use on farms in Canada and the United States, as well as in Australia.
Another new form of technology that could help solve farm theft is facial recognition for cows, based on UNE research called Stoktake.
Dr Mulrooney describes it as "a version of Facebook for cattle", explaining how AI technology can be used to identify individual cows.
"It'll look for small variations in cow muzzles," Dr Mulrooney says.
"A cow's nose is as distinct as a human fingerprint. And so these cameras can pick up on that distinctiveness and differentiate one cow from another cow."
This type of imagery-based AI technology is currently being trialled with an app.
Dr Mulrooney says it could be used for other farm animals, such as in the investigation of the sheep theft in Logan.
"So when these 700 sheep turn up on the other side of Australia, if you were to apply this technology, you'd be able to recognise that, hey, that particular ewe doesn't belong here. It's in fact, from Victoria. And we know exactly where it is," he says.
"It's the same kind of facial recognition that you run through at the airport [that] is being applied to cows and crime prevention."
Prevention better than cure
Detective Chief Inspector Cameron Whiteside is part of the New South Wales Police's rural crime prevention team.
He's investigated various farm-related crimes over the years, including firearm theft, oyster theft, beehive theft – anything that impacts the running of the farm.
He strongly encourages those living in rural settings to view their farms through the eyes of an offender.
"What would you steal? When would you do it? How would you enter the property? And that's the first point of call [on] how to target [protect] your property. So prevention is much better than cure."
He remembers a farmer who attended one of his crime scene management workshops , who then had to put his newly acquired skills to use the following day.
"One of those farmers did become a victim of a crime where someone went on to cut fences and stole diesel from [his] machinery," Detective Whiteside says.
"We ended up lifting forensic evidence from the machine which tracked the offender down."
And while Detective Whiteside would like to see more people brought before the courts for farm-related crimes, he'd much rather try and prevent them – be it with education or emerging AI technology — in the first place.
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