38 | New Scientist | 25 April 2020maims and kills”. However, he adds, the plan
acknowledges the environmental and cultural
significance of dingoes and only controls
them where they “pose a risk or impact upon
agricultural, biodiversity and social assets”.
In practice, however, even where pest
control policies aim to conserve dingoes,
little distinction is made between them and
feral domestic dogs. A good balance hasn’t
been struck, says Kylie Cairns at the University
of New South Wales. “The biggest threat to
dingoes is lethal control,” she says. “How are
you supposed to conserve an animal when
you also consider it a pest species that must
be eradicated?”Poison rain
Of particular concern is aerial baiting. The
practice, which entails dropping meat laced
with a controversial poison called 1080, is
central to most wild dog control programmes,
even in some national parks and state forests.
This scattergun approach takes a huge toll on
non-targeted species. What’s more, there is
little evidence that it is effective at protecting
livestock from dingoes in the long run. In the
short term, however, baiting can decrease
dingo pack size by as much as 90 per cent
and fracture their social structures.
Dingoes are too adaptable and widely
dispersed to be in danger of outright
extinction. However, entire populations have
already been eradicated from some regions,
especially those dependent on farming; and
there is a high risk of local extinction in others,
especially in the south east.
Mifsud says claims that wild dog control isn’t
targeted are “simply untrue”. In fact, he argues
that control is protecting dingo populations by
limiting opportunities for cross-breeding with
feral domestic dogs. Cairns doesn’t buy this.
“It’s not helping the conservation of dingoes,
to kill other dingoes,” she says. The presence
of any domestic dog genes in dingoes, making
them hybrids, has been “weaponised” against
these animals, she says. “I think that lens has
been really dangerous, because it means that
we have a negative view of anything that isn’t
strictly ‘pure’. And there’s no real ecological or
biological reason why that necessarily needs to
be happening.”
Besides, Cairns’s recent research with Letnic
suggests the issue of hybridisation has been
overstated. Analysing the DNA of 783 wild
dogs killed by pest control in eastern New
South Wales, they found only five animals
were feral domestic dogs with no dingo DNA.
The majority were more than 75 per cent dingo,What is a dingo?
The dingo is generally
accepted as a native
Australian species, closely
related to the New Guinea
singing dog. The oldest
confirmed dingo fossil dates
to around 3500 years ago.
There is no evidence that
they ever inhabited
Tasmania, an island to the
south of the mainland,
indicating that they arrived
from South-East Asia before
it separated from northern
Australia approximately
12,000 years ago.
Until recently, they
were thought to have been
brought over by humans
around 5000 years ago –
perhaps just a single
pregnant female singing
dog, whose descendants
then spread across Australia
and developed their own
characteristics over time.
However, in 2016, genetic
analysis revealed that there
are two distinct dingopopulations today: one
in north-western areas of
the country, the other in the
south east. “That suggests
that there were quite
possibly two migrations
into Australia, and that...
the evolutionary history of
dingoes was much more
complicated than first
thought,” says Kylie Cairns at
the University of New South
Wales, who led the research.
It also appears that the
dingo’s origins are more
ancient. Genetic analysis of
when these two populations
diverged suggests that
dingoes arrived in Australia
between 8000 and
10,000 years ago. That has
led Cairns and her colleagues
to believe that separate
groups of dingoes may
have made their own way
to Australia from Papua New
Guinea, over a land bridge
that became submerged
around 8000 years ago.“ Dingoes were thought to
have been brought over by
humans 5000 years ago”
CR
ED
IT^ A
RC
O^ I
MA
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LA
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In traditional
Aboriginal
societies, people
and dingoes
had a mutually
beneficial
relationship