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“ Across Australia, the
killing of dingoes is
permitted, and in some
states it is mandated
under pest control laws”
Most countries with apex predators have
reached an equilibrium between conservation
concerns and farmers’ interests – albeit often
an uneasy one, as with the recent return of
wolves to continental Europe. Australia has
never come close.
Across Australia, the killing of dingoes is
permitted – and in some states mandated
under pest control laws – in the name of
exterminating “wild dogs” that roam the
bush, preying on livestock and native animals.
In legislation, the term wild dogs is appliedequally to dingoes, feral domestic dogs and
hybrids of the two. The fact that dingoes and
domestic dogs can interbreed and produce
fertile offspring only complicates matters.
Even biologists can’t agree on how to classify
dingoes. Six years ago, Letnic co-authored a
paper arguing they should have their own
species name: Canis dingo. So far, this has been
contested or ignored, with dingoes generally
being considered a subspecies of domestic dog
or wolf.
There is no doubt that wild dogs, dingoes
included, are a problem for farmers. Since 2014,
the National Wild Dog Action Plan – a joint
government and industry effort, funded by
meat, wool and livestock bodies – has led the
response, in coordination with state and
territory-specific strategies. The plan estimates
that wild dogs cost the agricultural sector
A$89 million annually. Its coordinator,
Greg Mifsud, describes the dingo as “simply
a wild-living dog, a predator that attacks,become inextricably intertwined with one of
the most sensational episodes in Australia’s
recent history: the death of baby Azaria
Chamberlain at Uluru in 1980. After 30 years
and four inquests, a coroner eventually ruled
that she had been taken from her cot by a
dingo. This, and a few other attacks by dingoes,
casts a long shadow, in which anti-dingo
attitudes can thrive, says Newsome. Mike
Letnic, a conservation biologist at the
University of New South Wales, likens the
“culture wars” over dingoes to that over
badgers and foxes in the UK. “It’s fraught
with all sorts of things: scientific uncertainty,
lots of politics, history,” he says. “It’s deeply
intertwined.”
Attitudes towards the dingo are certainly
mixed. The vast majority of Australians, living
on a sliver of highly urbanised coastline,
may have romantic notions of it as an iconic
national species. But in rural communities,
anti-dingo sentiment still runs deep. >