DOG bones found dumped in bushland at Swan Bay have disappeared following media reports of their discovery, adding to suspicion that the skeletal remains were part of a mass grave.
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On Monday morning, RSPCA officers inspected the creekside gully where, it had been reported on Sunday, two cyclists had found a scattering canine backbones, ribs and skulls seemingly cracked in similar ways.
The bones had been left with a hessian sack and a tarpaulin, Swan Bay locals Bobbie Antonic and Tracey Sneddon said.
But the RSPCA officers found on Monday morning that most of the bones had been gathered up and removed, along with the sack and tarpaulin.
The officers collected some of the remaining bones, including a skull.
Those remains will now form part of an RSPCA forensic examination, RSPCA northern inspectorate head Scott Myers said.
“We have removed skeletal remains, and scanned them with a microchip reader in an attempt to identify them,” Mr Myers said.
“They appear to be canine remains. I wouldn’t like to say at this stage whether they are greyhound remains.”
Asked if the skeletal remains appeared to have been tampered with, Mr Myers said, “yes, 100 per cent.”
Some bones remained scattered through the gully after the RSPCA officers left, including vertebrae and what appeared to be a dog’s pelvis.
Swan Bay greyhound and horse trainer Neil Dockerty said he hadn’t heard about the bones, but they weren’t the remains of any of his dogs.
Mr Dockerty said the area had “all kinds of dogs that can die all kinds of ways”, and it would be wrong to assume the bones were greyhounds’.
“You’ve got wild dogs around, and if a dog comes on your land you can shoot it. Otherwise you could lose a sheep, or a thoroughbred,” he said.
Another Swan Bay greyhound trainer, Alex Verhagen, told the Newcastle Herald he didn’t “know anything” about the bones.
The gully where they were found, he said, is a local dumping ground for rubbish and burnt-out cars because of its clearing in the treeline and nearness to the road.
“Trucks and cars pull up in that clearing and dump their shit in there, then piss off,” Mr Verhagen said.
Mr Verhagen gave evidence at last year’s inquiry into greyhound racing that he had driven to Kempsey to get a council ranger to destroy his unwanted dogs, because vets were too expensive and the sport’s governing body didn’t educate trainers.
