RSPCA officers are shooting starving sheep and cattle on parched district farms.

Regional inspector Jean Sprague has attended Yass, Gunning and Goulburn properties where cows and sheep have either been shot, or owners ordered to feed them.

“It’s just unacceptable. A good farmer knows he has to take into account the cost of keeping the protein level up to his stock,” Ms Sprague said.

“People say, ‘the prices have dropped, I was waiting for the price to go up.’ Well, you are going to go out backwards. They just don’t do the maths on it.”

As lambing and calving livestock compete with kangaroos in plague numbers, welfare officers and police are prosecuting some farmers with hungry stock for animal cruelty.

Rain at the wrong time and high numbers of cattle from the north flooding markets and depressing prices – a legacy of suspending live export with Indonesia in 2011 – have caught farmers off guard.

Braidwood district vet Bob Templeton is warning farmers passers by won’t tolerate seeing skinny cows in paddocks without grass.

“We are getting neighbours putting in people for their (starving) stock, where they never used to do it.

“The animal welfare bar has been raised dramatically in the last few years, which is a great thing because it keeps people on their toes.”

Ms Sprague said land owners at fault ranged from absentee farmers to experienced stockmen, who had become complacent.

“It all comes down to this: if you’ve got stock, feed them. An animal can get sick, an animal can have a veterinary issue and that is a different thing all together.

“When an animal is simply starving, the finger points to the person in charge,” Ms Sprague said.

Elders Goulburn manager Steve Ridley said a post-winter sale last Wednesday attracted about 2000 older sheep and lambs.

Mr Ridley said prices were firmer than cattle prices, which had been falling, partly because Indonesia had stopped trading with Australia.

“Central Queensland has been very dry. What that does is push a lot of those cattle south, it has a flow on effect, right the way through.”