Crows Nest local, Kal Carrick, may seem like an unlikely award recipient, but his iconic wild cattle catching bionic arm invention has been awarded a 2018 Australia Day medal for services to the nation’s livestock industry.
The humble 75-year-old descried his feral buffalo and wild cattle catching bionic arm invention as “born out of necessity” after the government enforced that only bulls four-years-old or over could be shoot and all younger animals had to be caught live.
The government was trying to stop some unscrupulous suppliers who substituted thick, good quality buffalo hides by wrapping two thinner cow and calf hides together.
- Kal Carrick, Wild Cattle Catching Bionic Arm Inventor
“This resulted in many young men up in the Northern Territory getting real hurt because we had to try and now lasso rope them because we couldn’t shoot them anymore,” Mr Carrick said.
“The government was trying to stop some unscrupulous suppliers who substituted thick, good quality buffalo hides by wrapping two thinner cow and calf hides together.
“The ban meant the feral buffalos had to be delivered live for export markets.”
This forced need for a better way of wrangling the wild animals spurred Mr Carrick to invent a better way of catching feral buffalo.
With parts collected from a local rubbish dump and inventive fabrication work, Mr Carrick put together the first steel bionic cattle catching arm and fitted it to the front of his Land Cruiser Ute in the late 1970s.
The bionic arm became affectionately known as the “buff catcher”.
“I have a background as a motor bike mechanic and that knowledge helped me come up with the buff catcher idea,” Mr Carrick said.
“I’m only a small piece in the puzzle of many great people who worked up in the top-end of Australia catching feral buffalo and wild cattle.”
Generally, the buffalo catching bionic arm is powered by an electric motor mounted on the chassis rail behind the bullbar. Several drive-belts run from an electric motor across the front of a flyscreen-shielded radiator grille to the ratchet mechanism that raises the catching arm. A steel tube that mechanically releases and drops the arm, or raises it through the operation of an electric switch, runs from the ratchet mechanism, along the top of the bonnet, to a control in front of the driver.
The feral buffalo industry significantly declined in Australia during the late 1980s as herds of feral buffalo were culled-out across northern Australia.
Much of the buffalo industry and the way of life it supported greatly declined.
