36 | New Scientist | 25 April 2020
Every dog
has its day
Conserving Australia’s dingo, a predator reviled for
centuries, could be key to restoring fire-ravaged flora
and fauna, finds Elle Hunt
B
Y JANUARY, when the world turned its
attention to Australia’s bush-fire crisis,
Murray Ings had been battling blazes
near his home in the hills of northern New
South Wales for months. A third-generation
forestry worker and volunteer firefighter, Ings
worked shifts of up to 16 hours, sometimes
through the night, in apocalyptic conditions.
It got so hot, the sand in the soil melted to
glass, causing the ground to shine. “That’s a
furnace,” says Ings. But what he remembers
most vividly is the “haunting, piercing”
screams of dying animals. “It’s the worst
sound you can ever hear,” he says.
With the fires now extinguished, parts of
the native forest on Ings’s property resemble
a wasteland. “In areas, we’ve lost the whole lot:
all the trees, all the animals,” he says. That’s
just on his 500 hectares. Across south-east
Australia, some 19 million hectares burned.
The federal government has set out a multi-
million-dollar restoration programme. It isFeatures
a huge task that could take decades – even if
major fires don’t erupt again.
However, amid efforts to restore Australia’s
native fauna, one animal is expected to
continue dying. Dingoes, a type of semi-wild,
primitive dog, are widely considered pests, the
threat they pose to livestock trumping their
status as a native species. Yet there is mounting
evidence that these apex predators play a key
role in maintaining ecological balance. They
might even be as central to restoring the bush
as wolves have been in rewilding Yellowstone
national park in the US. But for that to happen,
Australians will need to put an end to centuries
of bad blood with their native canid.
It was thought that people brought the
ancestors of the dingo to Australia from South-
East Asia around 5000 years ago, although new
evidence hints at a different origin story (see
“What is a dingo?”, page 38). Regardless of how
and when they arrived, dingoes were quickly
integrated into Aboriginal communities,reared from pups to be pets, to help with
hunting and to act as guards. On reaching
maturity, however, these “camp dingoes” are
thought to have gone into the bush to breed.
This mutually beneficial relationship
between people and predators ended abruptly
with the mass arrival of European settlers in- Dingoes were the most obvious threat
to their livestock, being one of just two large,
land carnivores in Australia. The other, the
thylacine, was confined to Tasmania by that
time and was eventually hunted to extinction,
as far as we know. “Dingoes were painted as a
villain quite early on,” says ecologist Thomas
Newsome at the University of Sydney. In the
1880s, a barrier known as the “dingo fence” was
built along some 5600 kilometres to protect
the south-eastern corner of the continent.
It is still maintained today, at an annual cost
of A$10 million (£5 million). As a pest control
effort, it is without parallel, says Newsome.
More recently, the dingo’s public image has